There are quite a few problems in your code, but the main one is that you open the file, but never actually read it, which you could do with something like this:

@MyGed = <MYFILE>;
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That should probably solve your problem and make your script work. I would suggest, however, that you rewrite the script in accordance with commonly accepted best practices. For example as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $file_in = "C:/Users/Jill/Documents/Genealogy/birdt.ged";
open my $FILE, "<", $file_in or die "could not open $file_in $!";  # t
+hree-argument open syntax
my @ged = <$FILE>;                                                 # s
+lurp the file contents into @ged
my $count = $.;  # or, as you had it: my $count = @ged;
print "10th record :  $ged[10]\n";                                 # n
+ote that $ged[10] is really the 11th record (array subscripts start a
+t 0)
print "No. of records : $count \n";
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