Contents
01The pages
The tree is one tree. It is simply shown in different amounts depending on which page you open and what your account is allowed to see.
| Page | Shows | People |
|---|---|---|
| Loading… | ||
/family-tree shows everybody.
The others show one part of the family, and the two joined pages show a parent's side together.02Getting in
If you have never signed in
Open the page for your part of the family and choose Create account. You give your name, your email address and a password you pick. A six-digit code is emailed to you to prove the address is yours.
Once you enter that code the request goes to the admin, who approves or declines it. You get an email either way. Until then you cannot sign in — confirming your email is not the same as being approved.
Each page has its own sign-in
An account belongs to a part of the family. If you try to sign in on another family's page it will tell you plainly that the account is not for that part of the family. That is not a mistake — it is the point. Ask the admin if you should have access to more.
03Reading the tree
A person's card
Each card shows a first name and a surname. Where a woman took her husband's surname, the name she was born with sits between the two, in a lighter type — so Holly / Bassler / Randhawa means Holly Randhawa, born Bassler.
A small coloured bar down the left of each card and a tinted circle show whether the person is recorded as male or female.
Couples and children
Two cards joined by a short link are a couple. Lines drop from a couple to their children. The tree is drawn so that no two lines ever cross, which is why people are sometimes not in the order you would expect — the order is chosen to keep the lines readable.
04What the line colours mean
Every line is drawn in the colour of the side of the family it belongs to.
| Colour | Side | Named after |
|---|---|---|
| Loading… | ||
05Moving around
- Drag anywhere to move the tree. Scroll or pinch to zoom.
- Fit to screen — the button beside the zoom controls — pulls the whole tree into view however wide it is.
- Search by name at the top jumps straight to a person.
- Click a person to open their details, their parents, partner and children, and to move to any of them.
- Export, if your account has it, downloads the tree as a picture — cut to exactly the same people and details you can see on screen.
06Something looks wrong
Open the person, then use Report to send a correction. It goes to the admin by email with the person's name attached, so you do not have to explain which one you mean.
Names, dates and relationships in a family tree are often uncertain. If something is wrong, saying so is genuinely useful — nobody minds.
07The admin panel
At /admin, behind its own username and password. Only the admin sees any of this.
| Tab | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Requests | People waiting to be approved. Approve or decline, with a message that is emailed to them. |
| Tree accounts | Everyone who has signed up, with their permissions, which sides they see, and a private note only you can read. |
| Families | One place per family: its page, whether it is open, whether sign-ups are open, its members and waiting list, and a picker to move someone to another family. |
| People | Everyone in the tree, searchable, showing which pages each person appears on. |
| History | Every saved snapshot of the tree, each restorable in one click, and a log of sign-ins, failed attempts, downloads and changes. |
| Settings | The site-wide switches — see below. |
| Server | How the machine is doing, what is running, restart buttons and the live log. |
| NAS users / Email / Admin login | The file-storage side, mail status and unsent mail, and changing your own admin username and password. |
08Permissions
Each account can be given or refused each of these individually, in Tree accounts. Every one is enforced on the server: anything switched off is not sent to that person at all, rather than merely hidden on screen.
| Permission | What it allows | New accounts |
|---|---|---|
| Loading… | ||
09Site switches
In Settings. These apply to everyone except you — turning something off can never lock you out of the panel that turns it back on.
| Switch | What it does | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Loading… | ||
10Backups and safety
Nothing is lost
Every single change to the tree writes a dated snapshot first, kept beside the live copy. The History tab lists them with how many people each held, and restores any of them in one click. Restoring snapshots the current state first, so a wrong restore is undone by another restore.
A picture of the tree is saved alongside each snapshot, so a backup can be looked at without loading it.
Who can see what
Sides, permissions and page access are all decided on the server. Opening the browser's developer tools and editing the page changes what is drawn but not what is sent — the data for a family you cannot see never reaches your computer in the first place.
11The machine
The site runs on a small computer at home. benning.vip reaches it through a Cloudflare tunnel, so nothing is exposed directly to the internet — there are no open ports.
To administer it from anywhere, connect that computer to Tailscale: the machine is already on it, which gives a private connection from any network without opening anything up.
The site restarts itself if it ever stops, and a restart takes a few seconds.
12Right now
Read from the running site the moment you loaded this page.
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