🔍 Browse People

Browse is the quickest way to find one person.

1. Type part of a name into the search box — first name, surname, or both.
2. Press Enter or click Search.
3. Click any result card to open that person's full profile.

How results are ordered

To help you spot the right person, results are sorted deliberately:

• People with a known birth year appear first, youngest to oldest.
• People without a birth year follow, ordered by how closely their name matches.

No results are hidden — scroll down to see every match.

👤 Person Profiles

Clicking anyone — in any view — opens their profile panel. It collects everything known about that person:

• Tags — notable badges such as President, Signer, or Inventor.
• Also Known As — alternate names and spellings.
• Vitals — birth and death dates and places.
• Life Events — residences, marriages, military service and more, in date order.
• Spouses — with marriage and divorce details. Divorce details show in red.
• Parents & Children — clickable links to relatives.
• Sources — the records each fact is drawn from (expand the section to read them).

Every name shown is a link. Click through relatives to walk the family, then use ← Back to retrace your steps.

🔗 Relationship Finder

This view explains exactly how two people are related.

1. In the Person A card, search a name and click the correct result.
2. Do the same in the Person B card.
3. The connection is traced automatically once both are chosen.

Reading the result

• A Blood Connection shows the shared ancestor and the line of descent — for example, "Alice is the 3rd Great-Granddaughter of John Doe."
• Additional connections (such as links through marriage) are listed below the blood path.
• If nobody links them, you'll see "No connection found."

Tip: Confirm you picked the right person — check the birth year on the selected badge. Two relatives often share a name.

🕸 Connected Tree

The Network view draws a single tree showing how several people are all connected.

1. Search for a person and click them to add them to the list.
2. Repeat for everyone you want to include.
3. Click Render Connected Tree.

The result opens in the Tree view. It shows only the people needed to explain the connections — the shared ancestors, the path between them, and their spouses for context. Siblings and unrelated branches are left out to keep the story clear.

🪴 Ancestors & Descendants

This view builds a generation-by-generation chart around one person.

1. Search for a person and click to select them.
2. Use the Generations slider to choose how many generations to show (1–8).
3. Click Show Chart.

The chart shows ancestors above and descendants below, including spouses. Higher generation counts show more people but take longer to draw — start small and increase as needed.

🌳 Tree View

The Tree view is an interactive, zoomable map of the family.

1. Search for a person to focus on and click Draw Tree.
2. Drag with the mouse to pan around.
3. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Expanding the tree

• A node with a small dot has relatives that aren't shown yet — click it to expand them.
• Click a fully-expanded node to open that person's profile.
• Use Save Image to download the current tree as a picture.

⌛ Timeline

The Timeline view plots every direct ancestor and descendant of a focus person on a horizontal time-track, with each couple sharing a color.

1. Search for a person and click to select them as the focus.
2. Adjust the Zoom slider for pixels-per-year, then click Build Timeline.
3. Drag the timeline left and right to scroll through the centuries.

Reading the bars

• Each bar spans a person's life. Younger people appear nearer the top.
• Couples share a pastel color — that's how to spot which row belongs to which family.
• The focus person has a dark outline and bold text.
• Bars with diagonal stripes are estimated — either the date was "about", or there was no recorded birth so we placed it by generation.
• Click any bar to open that person's profile.

📅 Birthday Calendar

A month-grid calendar showing every relative whose birth records include both a day and a month. Each square lists only living family members whose birthday falls on that day, name-only.

Navigating

• Use the arrows on either side of the month name to step through months.
• Click Today to jump back to the current month.
• The current day's square is highlighted in your accent color.
• A small gray dot in a square means only deceased relatives share that birthday — the modal toggle will surface them.

Day details

1. Click any square that has birthdays to open the details modal.
2. Each row shows the person's name, birth year, and the age they'll turn this year.
3. Click the name to open that person's full profile.
4. Flip the Show deceased toggle in the modal header to include ancestors who shared the date.

Adding birthdays to your calendar

Each person row has two buttons that build a recurring yearly birthday event:

• Google Calendar — opens calendar.google.com in a new tab with the event pre-filled. One tap to save. Best for Android and anyone using Google.
• Apple / Other (.ics) — downloads a standard iCalendar file. iOS opens it directly in Apple Calendar. macOS users double-click it; Outlook desktop and other apps import it via File → Open Calendar.

Both options set the event to recur every year, so you only need to add it once.

Why some relatives aren't shown

The calendar excludes records where the birth date is approximate ("about 1810"), year-only, a baptism note, or otherwise can't be pinned to a specific day. That's roughly half the tree — you'll still find those people in the other views.

🌎 Family Map

The Map shows where in the world the family came from. Each US state and country is shaded according to how many people in the tree have their first recorded location there — darker means more.

Reading the map

• Hover any region to see its name and the count of relatives from there.
• Click a region to open a list of every person whose first known location is there. Click a name to jump to their full profile.
• Regions in pale have no recorded family.
• The United States is drawn at state level; everywhere else is at country level.

Zooming and panning

• On a computer: scroll the mouse wheel to zoom, click and drag to pan, double-click a spot to zoom in there.
• On a phone or tablet: pinch with two fingers to zoom, drag with one finger to pan, double-tap a spot to zoom in there.
• Use the + / − / ↺ buttons above the map any time for one-tap zoom in, zoom out, and reset.

About the United Kingdom

The world map shows the UK as a single shape, so England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland share the same color. The breakdown by constituent country still appears in the click-modal as colored chips above the people list.

Where the "first recorded location" comes from

For each person we look at, in order: their birth place, then their death place, then the place of the first other event on their record. People with no recorded place at all aren't shown on the map — that's about 3,300 of the 19,000 in the tree, mostly people whose only data is a name and a year.

Tip: A few overseas territories show up colored under their parent country — for example, French Guiana on the north coast of South America is part of France, and Greenland is part of Denmark. That's accurate, just genealogically unintuitive.

✨ My Family

The My Family page is a personal dashboard built around you — it only appears when your account is linked to a person in the tree. (If you don't see the entry, ask the admin to link you.)

What's on the page

• Welcome banner — your name, birth/death, and how many of your direct ancestors the tree knows about.
• Your immediate family — parents, spouse(s), children, and siblings as clickable cards.
• Notable ancestors in your line — your earliest known ancestor, the longest-lived person in your direct line, the one with the most children, and a quick branch-coverage stat.
• Your ancestry mix — a stacked bar of the countries your direct ancestors were born in, with percentages.
• On this day in your family — births and deaths of your direct ancestors on today's calendar date.

Tip: every name on this page is clickable — open the full profile to dig deeper, then use Back to return.

⭐ Famous Kin

The Famous Kin panel sits beside the Relationship view and lists relatives with notable distinctions — Presidents, Signers, Inventors and more.

• Click a category chip to filter the list to just that group.
• Use the filter box to search by person or category name.
• Each row has → A and → B buttons — click one to drop that person straight into the Relationship finder, then pick a second person to see how you connect.

✅ Getting Accurate Results

A few habits will keep your findings reliable:

• Pick the right person. Many relatives share a name. Always check the birth year and parents before trusting a result.
• Dates may be approximate. Historical records can be estimates. A date shown as "about 1850" is the record's best guess, not a certainty.
• Check the sources. Each profile lists the records behind its facts. Expand the Sources section to judge how solid a claim is.
• Search broadly, then narrow. If you don't see someone, try a shorter or partial name — spellings vary in old records. Alternate spellings are listed under Also Known As.
• Blood vs. marriage. In the Relationship finder, a "Blood Connection" means shared ancestry; other connections may run through marriage rather than descent.
• Missing links aren't disproof. "No connection found" means none is recorded in this tree — not that none exists.

🔄 Reset & Refresh

The family tree is stored in your browser the first time you sign in so the site loads instantly on every visit. New people and corrections are added to the tree from time to time — if you'd like to make sure you're looking at the most up-to-date version, pull a fresh copy.

This will clear the saved copy from your browser and bring you back to the screen where you can choose to download a fresh tree or upload a file you've been sent.

Nothing about your account or settings is changed — this only clears the cached tree data so the next load fetches the latest version.