The family tree that stays yours.

What most family tree sites get wrong

Search for a family tree app and you will mostly find the same thing: a public database of names and records, a push to make your tree discoverable, and a business built on selling access to historical records or, in some cases, using your uploaded photos in ways you did not picture when you uploaded them.

That might be fine if you are chasing down distant records. It is not fine if what you are keeping is your own living family: photos of your kids, phone numbers, where people were born, who is related to who. That is not research. That is private.

What Ukoo Yangu does differently

• Build your tree across generations. Add people, connect them as parents, partners, siblings or children, and attach photos and stories to each one.

• See it as a real diagram. Search for anyone, follow a single branch, or look at just the last few generations at a time.

• Decide who sees what, person by person, field by field. You choose whether your birthday, your phone number or where you live is visible to the whole family, to a few people you pick by name, to the stewards only, or to nobody but you.

• Relatives confirm relationships, not editors. When somebody records that you are their father, the app asks you, or asks the relatives best placed to know. Two have to agree before it becomes a fact, and silence is not agreement.

• Ask for something to be changed or removed. If a relative added something about you that you want limited or taken down, you can ask directly, and whoever looks after the family's tree has to answer within a month.

• Print a real wall poster of your tree, in the size and style you choose, but nobody's name goes on paper without them agreeing to it first.

• Take your data with you, or delete it. Your family's whole tree can be exported, or deleted outright, whenever you ask. A steward does either from the family's own settings page, and the export is a .zip holding every record and every photograph. It is yours either way.

• No public list of families. No public search, and no way for a stranger to find out whether your family is even using Ukoo Yangu. Not even by trying an address at the door.

Built on a real family's tree

Ukoo Yangu is not a demo built on made-up names. It is being built and tested on a real family, going back five generations, starting with a family from Mankon in Cameroon's North West Region. That includes real complications that most family tree apps never get tested against: people who belong to two families at once through marriage, births nobody recorded a year for, three relatives with the same name, a child who came into a marriage with their mother, and a household that needs its own way of being drawn. If the privacy rules hold up here, they will hold up for your family too. Read the story.

How it got here

1. December 2023

   Drawn in Canva. The first version of our family's tree was a design on Canva.

2. September 2026

   Made the move from Canva to here, so we can keep the tree secure and private, and have more family members contributing to growing it.

3. October 2026

   Opening it to other families. You will be able to start a tree and invite your own relatives. Recording your family, inviting relatives, keeping it private, and taking it all out again is free.

What will cost money, said now rather than once you have put your family in. The printed poster is the only thing that will be sold, once it has been tested properly, and it will show its price before you order anything.

One thing is honestly still rough. Only email is delivered - sign-in codes arrive by email, and WhatsApp and SMS are not wired up, so a relative who is only reachable on WhatsApp needs their invitation link passed on by hand. The FAQ says what else is and is not ready.