The KleioBase family tree is live today. Open it from the sidebar and your family draws itself as an interactive chart, built from the records you have already confirmed. Pan, zoom, focus on any person, and follow the branches out.
That part you would expect. Every genealogy tool has a tree, and ours does the things a good one should - which we will get to. But drawing your family was not the interesting problem to solve. Every one of these tools is happy to render a tidy chart of what you already know. What we wanted was a tree that also tells you what to do next.
A tree that knows what a complete profile looks like
Most trees, ours included, will draw a blank where a parent is missing. When you have not recorded someone's father, KleioBase puts a dashed Unknown father or Unknown mother card in the empty slot so the gap has a place on the chart instead of a branch that just stops. Click it to fill it in. That much is fairly standard now, and it should be.
The difference is what happens on the cards that are already filled in. A conventional tree treats a person with a name and two dates as done. Ours does not, because it is not working from what you typed into a form - it is sitting on top of your actual archive of records, and it knows the difference between a person you have documented and a person you have merely named.
So click any card and the side panel opens with a Research section. It scores that person against seven basics: name, birth date, birth place, death date, occupation, parents, and at least one linked record. Then it sorts them into what is still Missing and what is already Documented.
This is the part other trees cannot really do, because they have no archive to measure against. Your great-grandmother has a name and a birth year, so on any other chart she looks finished. Here she shows up with a plain list: birth place missing, occupation missing, no record linked. That is not a criticism of your research. It is your next three tasks, written out, on the person they belong to.
The completeness checklist is on every plan, including the free one.
The tree tells you where to dig
On the Researcher plan and above, the tree also surfaces what KleioBase has detected on its own.
A card with a small orange marker in its top corner is a research opportunity: that person is either sparsely documented or has no records linked to them at all. The Research section lists the specific findings for that person - a gap in their timeline, a sparse profile, a possible connection worth chasing - and each one opens in Insights.
The effect is that your next research session has a starting point. You open the tree, you look for orange, and you go. No more staring at a complete-looking chart trying to remember where you left off eight months ago.
The rest of it
The gap work is the point, but a research instrument still has to be a good chart. So:
It builds from your records. The tree is drawn from the families in your confirmed records and the relationships you add by hand. It is the same knowledge base as the rest of the app, not a separate tree you maintain in parallel. Confirm a record that links two people into a family and they appear.
Focus and breadcrumbs. Arrows on a card mean there is more family that way. Click one to re-center the tree on that person and pull the branch into view. A breadcrumb trail tracks where you have been so you can jump back. The focused person lives in the URL, so refreshing, hitting Back, and sharing a link all land in the same place.
Lines that mean something. Between partners, solid is married, dashed is divorced, dotted is an unmarried partnership. Between parent and child, solid is biological, dashed is adopted, dotted is foster or other. Multiple marriages each get their own line at their own height, so it is clear which children belong to which marriage. Hover any line to trace it. A legend on the canvas explains all of it.
People who appear twice. When two people who married are also related by blood, the tree draws one of them twice rather than running a line across the entire chart. A "2x" badge marks both copies and clicking it jumps between them.
Quick-add from the canvas. Every card has a + button: add a parent, spouse, child, or sibling without leaving the tree. Fill in a short form, save, and the new relative appears immediately, already linked. You can also click a dashed unknown-parent placeholder to fill that specific slot directly.
Touch and export. Drag to pan, pinch to zoom, one finger to move. Export the whole tree at full detail as PNG or SVG, or print it to paper or PDF. Exports capture the entire tree rather than the part on your screen, and they come out clean, without the working markers, arrows, and badges. Light or dark mode, whichever you are using.
Why this shipped last
We built the tree after the transcription, the extraction, the matching, and the research companion. That ordering was deliberate, and it is the reason the tree can do this at all.
A tree that you type into by hand can only ever show you what you typed. It has no idea what is missing, because as far as it knows, nothing is. A tree drawn on top of a connected archive of your actual records knows what a complete profile looks like, which of yours fall short, and which branches have never had a single document attached to them.
That is the difference between a chart and an instrument. The chart is a picture of your research. The instrument tells you where to point it next.
Open the Family Tree from the sidebar to see yours. The Family Tree guide covers everything above in more detail.
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