Familiagram: a private family tree the whole family builds together

The problem

Most family history lives in a shoebox of photos and in the memories of the oldest relatives. When nobody writes it down, it disappears. Genealogy websites help, but they are research tools built for one dedicated person, often with public records and paywalls, not a private place where a whole family adds what they know.

A family app also has to handle real family life. People fall out of touch, an organiser stops logging in, relatives pass away and duplicates get created. And because it holds photos and personal stories, privacy cannot be an afterthought.

Our solution

Each family gets its own private space. An organiser invites relatives by email, and everyone sees the tree on an interactive canvas that zooms from one person out across generations. Every person has a page with their dates, story and photos, and anyone in the family can contribute.

Nothing is ever lost by accident. Every change goes into a history that can be reverted, and governance tools handle the awkward cases: handing over the organiser role, memorialising someone who has died, merging duplicate people, and exporting or erasing personal data on request.

Photos are scanned for viruses on upload, stored in S3-compatible object storage and backed up off-site. Sign-in works with email and password or Google, and the whole interface is available in English and Spanish.

How it is engineered

The frontend is Next.js and React. The API is .NET with PostgreSQL and Redis. Every family is isolated at the database level with row-level security, so one family can never read another family’s data even if application code has a bug.

Deployment is automated: GitHub Actions builds the Docker images, backs up the database before each release, runs health checks and rolls back automatically if a release fails. More than a thousand automated tests cover the app and the API.

Where it stands today

Familiagram is live at familiagram.com, in English and Spanish. It went from a written brief to a production launch in under two weeks, which shows how fast a focused team can ship a privacy-sensitive app without cutting corners.

• Live in production at familiagram.com
• Each family isolated at the database level
• Full change history, export and erasure built in
• English and Spanish from the first release

What we built

• Private family spaces with email invitations
• An interactive tree canvas that zooms out across generations
• A page for every person with their story, dates and photos
• Full change history with the ability to revert
• Privacy tools for data export and erasure
• English and Spanish interface

Built with

• Next.js
• React
• .NET
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• S3-compatible storage
• Docker

Frequently asked questions