Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Online family tree maker built with React

plantafamilytree.com

89 pointsaqrashik51 comments

Example idea: Consider an example of a filled tree to show off. For instance, Game of Thrones

Pivot idea: Consider using the chart tool to map out relations of characters in stories, TV shows, legal cases, etc.

Service integration (client): Consider if your tree could fit in as a GSuite add-on: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/add-ons/

Service integration (host): create REST API's, or language libraries for people to use your tool programatically

Viral idea: Consider offering family trees for free so Wikia pages can link to them

Viral idea: Consider an embeddable app with zooming/panning that media websites and pay a monthly fee to integrate

Viral idea: Consider an import/export JSON schema users can use to share their graphs

If you really want to stress-test an arbitrary family tree documenter, try putting the X-Men in it.

http://img13.deviantart.net/4a05/i/2011/253/c/b/x_men_family... (and that's just the tip of the iceberg!)

Real family tress don't have to worry about time travel or cloning, of course, but that crazy stuff does actually serve as a reasonably good proxy of some of the strangest family trees out there (medieval European nobility, extended families with multiple divorces and remarryings, etc).

I love family trees: they're interesting, complex, data-driven, and beautiful. There are some very challenging decisions you need to make to make a tree readable, like whose ancestors to show, whose children, and how far back. To give you a sense, I have ~3,500 people in my family tree. I want different trees to show, say: a) all descendants of a root ancestor, or b) all of my ancestors.

This is reasonably easy to use and build out a simple tree. Here are two opportunities:

1) There are some UI areas that aren't totally intuitive (e.g., double click to add name), and generally it feels to "clicky" (e.g., too many clicks to get to the action I want). I think your goal is super-simple and "delightful" vs. full-featured.

2) The 1:1 relationship lines get complex, as every parent is linked to every child (so you end up with 2n lines that all overlap).

Thanks. Trees that are too big do get hard to manage currently and it is something I have been unable to decide on a solution for. I was thinking of allowing users themselves to expand or compress ancestors and descendants ( which would mean even more clicks :( ) to focus on the part of the tree they were currently working on.

This is very interesting insight! May I ask which software or service you use to keep track of your family tree?

Ancestry.com has the best UI and is the "easiest" to use that I've found. You can use it for free to just build your tree, but you'll feel like a second-class citizen. Their data sources are very good and easy to use, but you pay out the nose for them. (Obligatory note that I very much disagree with how Ancestry.com has set themselves up to collect money off the backs of researchers who often work for free, and will put your inputs behind their paywall.)

So Ancestry.com is a good place for research and for family tree management. I've set up the second half of my stack to generate HTML files, which I keep (publicly) on my personal site.

3500?!

and I don't even know who my grandfather was...

I go both up (I know all but 2 of my 16 g-g-grandparents, and 22 of my 32 g-g-g-grandparents) and down (I'm tracking 14+ generations of everyone descended from my 10th great-grandfather).

I'm the kind of person that likes 100% completion in my video games, so the idea of "filling in" all the gaps is satisfying to me. The amount of public records on BMD (birth, marriage, and death—the "holy trinity" of genealogical data points) is staggering in most countries. From census and SSA records in the U.S. to parish records in Scotland, you can find a lot of information.

Rather than clicking the plus to add a person, I think a more intuitive action would be to double-click empty space. Whether or not you change that, the 'click + to add a person' doesn't work - when you put the word 'click' on a page, people will click that and not pay attention to the rest of the directions. Even if they did, it's a little confusing because 'click + to add a person' isn't clear. You need to be more specific. 'click the plus button to add a person' and then have the plus button move so people see it.

A simple guided tutorial, similar to the beginning of most mobile games, could help here. You literally walk the user through the process of adding one person (themself most likely) and then let them grow from there. With a 'skip' option of course, if they don't want or need their hand held.

Thanks, I've tried to make onboarding easier by showing the popup tooltips, but I guess it needs more work

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll see how I can make it more intuitive

I recommend starting with one empty box (every family tree has at least one member) than an entirely blank screen.

Second that. The first time I opened the tab I thought it had failed to load and hit refresh. Only then I noticed the "plus" icon.

Your assumptions about families are conservative and oppressive, you moron!

or a palette of avatars you drag and drop into the network (son, daughter, man, woman, etc)

When you launch the person dialog, focus on the Name input, then when they click enter, save and close the dialog. You are also missing out on a number of fields when creating a family tree (gender and maiden name come to mind fight off the bat).

I've been a user and fan of Geni.com for several years now. I wish they'd update their interface to allow some friendliness like this.

Same. I've considered making my own interface for building family trees, as an exercise in UX design. But I'd want it to plug directly into Geni. You can't beat the feature to find other users' trees that match yours. Find long-lost cousins and great-great-great-whatevers that you didn't know you had.

I've considered multiple times writing an importer/exporter against their API so that I can use Gramps[1] to manage the rest of it.

[1]: https://gramps-project.org/introduction-WP/

Hey, sounds cool, let me just upload my GED^ file...

Ups, no upload feature (yet) - That would make it much more usable.

(^) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM

Good effort. I tried making something similar years ago, and it was hard (the visual side, not the data side).

I don't know what your goals are with this though. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but to 'genealogy enthusiasts', ie the people regularly spending money in this domain, your website is no more than a toy. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Ancestry.com offers this same tree building functionality for free (when you pay for a subscription with them, it is for the research capability, not the data entry capability).

I've searched my entire life for a way to write simple family trees with custom data, fast, with or without a lot of information.

Then I've come up with this: https://github.com/fiatjaf/rel, which is a simple way to create triples, then render dot graphs, or any template actually, with them. The database is actually a bunch of YAML files representing each node in the graph (the relationships are stored in the nodes' files also).

$4.99 a month seems a bit steep for what looks like a very basic UI with no features like multi-user editing or photos or anything other than a node-link builder.

It's still a nice UI for the primary task.

I'll admit that I spent a little too much time on this trying to create the most interconnected tree I could imagine, just to see how many "my descendent is also my ancestor" connections are possible. The flexibility of this is pretty impressive.

Beautiful job.

There might be some people posting "why didn't you just..." but I used this to show my kids their family tree and they really liked it.

Freeloaded though, so you need a way to compell people to pay (say extra large posters of the tree).

Post to r/genealogy as there are requests from time to time for tree makers.

Fyi. The church of latter day saints (Mormons) have familysearch.org which has circles to show generations. The church has for decades housed and built the largest library for finding relatives. I believe this is because once you enter the church you can "save" all your deceased relatives going back as far as you can.

The tree is really not important to genealogy nuts....

I really like the overall approach - definitely a nice friendly way to edit a tree.

The standard way for family trees to link children with parents is through the relationship of the parents. Did you avoid doing that on purpose?

The problem with having a separate parent/child link for every parent/child relationship is that it gets very crowded if the parents have several children.

I don't have experience in this area, but wouldn't the standard way get pretty messy in modern relationships, in which people have multiple children with multiple different alternating parents?

I assume you want to represent all of the relationships on the tree in any case, so I think minimising the number of required parent-child lines would actually make representing modern relationships less messy.

You'd have a pink relationship line for each partnership (that will be the same and just as messy in both approaches)

Then you'd have one child line from each relationship line to each of the children that came from that relationship, rather than two for each child.

So in a situation where Angus had 2 children with each of Beatrix and Chloe, you would have two child lines from the Angus-Beatrix relationship line and two from the Angus-Chloe line, rather than a total of 8 lines to show all the parent-child relationships in your current approach.

If Chloe also had two children with David then your approach would add a relationship line and another four child lines whereas the standard approach would just add the relationship and two more child lines.

I was thinking about not having relationship lines or even the concept of "relationship" at all. Relationships don't have any meaning concerning family nowadays, only kinship has.

I couldn't download the tree i just drew. It gave me an 'unknown error while downloading' Chrome on Google Pixel

Coincidentally, I was talking to my father about getting his family tree work 'stored' in some digital format for future generations.

It struck me that a simple directory structure with info about each person in each directory, text files with info in, and then tar'd up would be about the most future-proof format you could get.

Anyone else thought about this?

That might be the "easiest", but it's not the most portable, and would be a nightmare to navigate. I'd recommend he work in a software package that can export to GEDCOM. That's a structured data format used by genealogists to track relationships and metadata. The current version is 21 years old, and the original spec was designed in 1984. It's robust and industry-standard. Every single genealogical product worth its salt will be able to work with that format (and export to it).

I hate to recommend them, but ancestry.com has one of the best interfaces in a SaaS product, with a ton of data on the back-end if you are doing research. An actual application (Family Tree Maker comes to mind, but don't quote me or take that as a recommendation) might be better for just "documenting" research.

I'm not just being flippant, but GEDCOM is a dinosaur. Can you imagine Facebook storing its relationship data in GEDCOM? Unthinkable. Genealogy most certainly needs a new standard.

Also, I know people who work for ancestry, and the general thinking is it's hard to update old interfaces for a newer generation when a very important public is 50+.

Oh it's a nasty format, to be sure, and more useful for "cold storage" than something you'd actively work in. But for a long-term storage requirement? It's reasonably human readable and imminently portable as the go-to standard.

You can import a GEDCOM into any family tree software and be up and running in minutes. A tarball'd directory structure would be more of a nightmare.

On Ancestry.com, the UI is fine, and still better than anything else I've seen. If you have any other ideas, I'd love to hear them. My issue with Ancestry is primarily their model that actively hinders collaboration between researchers unless you've paid their toll. They're taking your research and charging others for the privilege of seeing it. Given the open and helpful nature of genealogical researchers (see also: "search angels"), this rubs me the wrong way.

(So I use Ancestry for research and tree management—and I pay them $200/yr for access to their data sources—then I export (what else?) a GEDCOM, route it through a couple scripts of my own making, and publish it on my personal site.)

The GEDCOM file format is basically nested documents, and uses graph like pointers for linking things, so it is not that bad.

The actual data model is terrible though, as it was created by the church based on their 'traditional' style families.

However, most programs do not use GEDCOM to store their data (they might use an SQL database for example), but merely as a way to transfer data between programs.

Also note that there is always someone working to make a replacement for GEDCOM. Some of the latest efforts are GEDCOM-X (made by the church again), and the work by [FHISO](http://fhiso.org/). A lot of such projects, eg BetterGEDCOM, get bogged down in 'internal' politics, and rarely get anywhere.

Is it robust? I help my mom with genealogy stuff from time to time and the gedcom file we got from some cousins was, let us say, a mess.

I agree it is widely supported.

One thing to watch out for with export is whether you are working with data that doesn't make it into the gedcom file.

As a file format, sure, it's robust. Garbage-in-garbage-out, though. A directory structure would be just as messy, and harder to use.

And great point on export. Assets like pictures are an example: you'd still need to store them somewhere. (IIRC, GEDCOM format points to a file path of some sort.)

Edit: actually, you can embed multimedia (as a BLOB of some sort) directly into a GEDCOM, but I'd leave the files separate to maintain human readability.

You're thinking the same things I do.

I should have read your comment before posting my shameless self-promotion, but here am I posting my super simple, customizable and future-proof tool again: https://github.com/fiatjaf/rel

(read about it on my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849823)

Nice! BTW I've never found a really nice, easy way to draw up organizational hierarchy charts (I've always used Dia or similar, and that's fussy), and I guess it's the same thing more or less?

Have you ever looked into Graphviz?

Here's a demo of the same old C Graphviz program running on JS: http://viz-js.com/

Nice work. Which library did you used for rendering connectors? I don't know how would you monetize it if you plan to. Also are you planning to open-source the code base?

It's just svg circles animated with css so no libraries were required. I've tried to keep external libraries to a minimum

OOC - what value "built with React" brings to the thing you have implemented?

Is this project downable? Github?

No. It's proprietary. And you can't even save without paying! :O

Any reasons for not having Facebook login (and perhaps deeper integration)?

No reason in particular, but I don't have a Facebook account so integration with Facebook would have required me to sign up first to test the integration. I don't mind creating an account on Facebook if required, but I am trying to avoid it if possible.

Oh, I just got downvoted, unsure why. I was thinking that it's a pretty neat tool to integrate with Facebook. As your primary goal is to build your family structure, you may want to share it with your family members (and maybe have them help building the tree).

Also, depending how you want to grow, fb login is typically the most successful one.

Cute graphics ! Some feedbacks :

- Please make sure forms can be validated with enter, an not just by clicking a button (use for onSubmit)

- allways auto-focus most important input of form (like a person's name) when opening it (at least when it's empty)

-after adding a person, open the form immediately

- when tree is empty, put the + button in the center of the screen, big, and with explaination. THen, make a transition to put it back to it's normal place. This way it makes it obvious and then falls back to standard material design location. Other option is to make an empty state image with a big, obvious arrow to the button.

- maybe add transitions that help user follow the change of state when adding someone to the tree.

Great work overall, i wish you the best for your project.

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