What a family tree looks like here

Two ways in, and only two. A relative invites you to a tree that already exists, or you start one yourself because nobody in your family has. There is no third route, and no public list of families to browse.

An invitation names the person you are in the tree. That link is what ties your account to your own record, and it is why the app can tell the difference between your details and everybody else's. A steward issues it for one named person and sends it on whatever reaches you: WhatsApp, SMS, email, or handed over at a gathering. It works once, expires after fourteen days, and cannot be shown again, so it is worth treating like a password. If you lose it, ask for a new one rather than asking for the old one.

Coming in without an invitation works the same way for everybody, whether or not you have been here before. You give an address that reaches you, a code comes back, and the code is what proves it is yours. The page deliberately does not offer two doors marked sign up and sign in: a page that did would be a way of finding out which address already belongs to somebody. Nobody is ever told whether an address is already on the service.

One account per person, however many addresses you put on it. You can add a second phone number or another email later and use any of them. If you turn out to already have an account and did not realise, the two can be joined into one, and only you can do that: the service will not tell anybody else that there was a second one.

You can belong to several families at once, which is what marriage does. One sign in reaches all of them, and your role is held per family, so you can be a steward of your own tree and a reader of your wife's.

Directory lists everybody by generation, which is the quickest way to find one person. Tree draws the family. Drag to move it, use the plus and minus to zoom, and Fit to view to get the whole thing back on screen at a size that reads.

Two styles: Portraits shows faces and initials, Chart shows rows of names, which is easier on a wide family. Filled portraits are people born into the family; outlined ones married in. A dashed outline is an ancestor nobody can name yet, kept in place so the line above is not lost.

The sidebar narrows the drawing in two different ways, and the difference matters. Choosing a branch, a line, or a number of generations removes people, because the point is to see one part of the family clearly. Searching, or asking for only the living, blends the rest out instead and leaves them faintly in place, because you are looking for somebody within the whole tree and losing its shape while you look would not help. The counter at the bottom says how many are shown and how many are blended out.

Your own node carries a You badge, and the Your record and privacy button at the top finds it for you. Colours follow the branches of the family; anybody above or beside the branch heads keeps a neutral brown. A dashed grey ring means somebody has kept their profile private, which is explained in the legend whenever anybody on the drawing has done it.

Click anybody to open their panel: their facts, their life story, their immediate family, and Show only this line, which narrows the whole drawing to them and their descendants.

The drawing can be adjusted three ways, and none of them changes a single record.Drag a person along their own row to change where they stand: a brother or sister among their brothers and sisters, or somebody past the person they married, which is how you put a wife on the near side of her husband. Nobody can be dragged into a row they do not belong to. Where a family is crowded, drag the gap between two rows to give that generation more room, and everything below it moves down with it; or drag the gap between two people to step them apart and widen the tree just there. Spread opens the whole drawing out at once when you pull it sideways, and Tidy up puts all of the spacing back to what the drawing chose for itself.

Who it changes it for depends on who you are. It changes for you and nobody else. Your relatives open the tree and find it exactly as they left it. A steward is the only person who can change what the whole family sees. Children born into a family after somebody arranged it join the end of their row rather than pushing into the middle of an order that was chosen.

Below the tree there is sometimes a short line reading Not connected here. Those are relatives the drawing cannot place, because every connection to them is either unrecorded or hidden from you. They are shown rather than left out, and no line is drawn to them, because a line to somebody whose place is unknown would have to cross the whole drawing to say nothing.

From somebody's panel you can add a parent, a child, a sibling or a partner. Nothing you add goes straight onto the tree, and this is the most important thing to understand about the archive: relatives confirm relationships, not editors. When you say somebody is your father, the app asks him, or asks the relatives best placed to know.

Until somebody confirms it, the connection does not exist for anybody else. If it was the only thing placing a new person in the tree, that person does not appear either. So a claim looks exactly like nothing having happened, which is the right behaviour for a claim.

Waiting on you is where questions put to you appear, and the number beside that tab is how you find out about them: nothing is emailed or texted, so the count in the header is the whole of it. Answering has two parts: whether the relationship is right, and if it is, whether the line may be shown to the whole family or kept private. The second question goes to you rather than to whoever proposed it, because it is your relationship that would be on display.

Two relatives have to agree before a claim becomes fact. One yes is one person saying so, which is the thing peer confirmation exists to be better than. If the two disagree about showing the line, the archive takes the more private answer, and saying nothing is not agreement. Where a family has fewer relatives with accounts than that, the claim waits on the stewards instead, and whoever proposed it is told so rather than being left expecting a reply.

Saying a connection is wrong takes it off the tree at once, without waiting for anybody else. A steward then looks at it.

You can also connect two people who are both already in the tree, rather than adding somebody new. That is the usual case for a cousin somebody else already entered.

Siblings are never recorded directly. Brothers and sisters are whoever shares a parent, worked out afresh every time the tree is drawn, so adding one child places them among all the others without anybody defining it. That is why adding a sibling asks which parents they share. Both, for a full brother or sister. One, for a half brother, or for a child who came into the marriage with their mother: naming the parent they do not have would give somebody else a parent they never had.

Adding a parent asks what kind, because it matters and the tree has no way to guess: a birth parent, somebody who adopted them, a step parent, or a guardian. All four place the person in the same part of the tree. They are not the same claim about them.

Archive holds written and recorded stories, photographs, and sources: a baptism register, a letter, a photograph of a grave. Tag the people who appear in something and it shows up on their profile, which is how a photograph of a gathering becomes forty people's photograph rather than one file nobody finds.

Anybody who can contribute may add to the archive. Changing or removing what somebody else added stays with the stewards, because the point of an archive is that relatives put things into it and nothing quietly disappears.

Timeline puts births, marriages, separations and deaths in order. Those are worked out from the tree itself, so they stay right when the tree changes. Reunions, naming ceremonies and migrations are written by hand, because nothing can work those out for you.

Photographs are never public. Every image is fetched with your own session and checked against your membership each time, so a copied image link does nothing in anybody else's browser.

Poster turns the tree into a printable sheet: A2, A1, A0, or 24 by 36 inches, portrait or landscape. Choose the whole family or one person's line, portraits or names, years on or off, and a background. The panel tells you how tall the names will actually print in millimetres, and says so plainly when they would be too small to read, with the next sheet up offered. The background's ink coverage is quoted as a percentage because a print shop charges by it.

Download the file gives you a vector SVG at the real paper size, which is what a print shop wants. Full screen shows it large; press Escape or click anywhere to come back.

A poster asks for consent separately from the app, and that is deliberate. Somebody who hid their phone number from this website has not thereby refused to be named on a wall in somebody's living room, so the poster asks its own question. Anybody whose record withholds their name appears in Names to clear, and the file cannot be downloaded until each of them is resolved. The count is on the button.

If it is you on that list, only you can answer it. Nobody can clear your name on your behalf. You may also withdraw your answer at any time, and nobody has to approve that.

Where somebody cannot be reached at all, a steward can record what they were told by them. That prints where they are rather than who they are, names the steward who vouched, and never hardens into permission however long it sits. Any objection cancels it immediately. Nobody is ever left blank: a refusal prints the place instead of the name.

Open your own record and you can set, field by field, who sees it. Four answers: the whole family, certain relatives you choose by name, the stewards only, or nobody but you. You can also hide your name, which shows a description instead, or keep your whole profile private.

Keeping your profile private empties your record for everybody except the stewards and you. It does not remove you from the tree. Your place in the family is what holds the lines above and below you together, and taking it out would break somebody else's parentage rather than protect yours.

Only you can change your own settings. Not a steward on your behalf, however well meant. If you want help, ask through the request queue below, so the change is recorded as something you asked for rather than something done to you.

Stewards keep access to what you hide from other relatives. They are accountable for the archive and cannot look after what they cannot see. What they cannot do is change your settings, and they cannot clear your name for a poster.

What you have asked for is where requests live. You can ask for a detail to be hidden, for your record to be reduced to the bare minimum, or for it to be removed altogether.

Anything protective may be asked for on somebody's behalf. An elder telephoning a granddaughter to say "take my number off" should not be stuck behind an app they will never use. Anything that reveals more has to come from the person themselves, because otherwise asking on somebody's behalf becomes a way of exposing them.

Removal has two shapes, and they are not the same. Reduced keeps your place in the tree and nothing else: your name becomes an initial and every detail is cleared, so the lines above and below you survive. Removed entirely takes your record and every connection to it, which means other people lose a recorded parent. The archive says who would be affected before anybody does it.

Requests carry a one month deadline, which is the law wherever the family lives, and the desk shows when one is overdue.

Roles belong to a family rather than to a person, so you can be a steward of your own tree and a reader of your wife's. Whoever starts a family owns it.

• ViewerReads the tree, the archive and the timeline. Confirms relationships about themselves, and controls their own record.
• ContributorEverything a viewer can do, and proposes new relatives and adds stories, photographs and sources.
• StewardEverything above, and invites relatives, answers requests, settles connections relatives could not settle, and edits what others added.
• OwnerA steward who also holds the family itself: exporting everything, and deleting the family.