Family Tree

What the Family Tree is

The Family Tree page draws your family as an interactive chart, built from the families in your confirmed records and the relationships you add by hand. Open it from the Family Tree item in the sidebar.

The chart is built from the same data as the rest of your knowledge base. People appear in it as records that link them into families are confirmed. If someone you expect is missing, check that a record or a manual link actually connects them to a family.

The tree uses the same home person as the rest of the app. If you have not chosen a home person yet, the page asks you to pick a person to start from. To start the chart from someone else, change your home person under Settings > Account & Preferences. See Getting Started for how to choose a home person and why it matters.

Move around the tree

• The chart starts from your home person and shows their ancestors above and descendants below, with spouses side by side.
• Drag to pan, and scroll or pinch to zoom. On a touch screen you can drag with one finger and pinch with two. The controls in the corner also zoom and re-center the view.
• Zoom out to see the overall shape of your family, or zoom in on a card to reveal full birth and death dates and places, not just years.
• Profile photos appear on cards when a person has one.
• Use the search box on the canvas to jump straight to someone by name. If they are already on screen, the tree pans to them and flashes their card. If they are outside the current view, the tree refocuses on them instead.

What the chart includes

The chart shows your direct ancestors along with your close relatives, such as your siblings and your aunts and uncles. More distant side branches, such as great-aunts and great-uncles, are kept off the chart so it stays readable, the way most family-tree tools do it. They are not lost: focus on the relevant ancestor to bring that branch into view.

Focus, expand, and breadcrumbs

Focusing re-centers the whole tree on one person so you can explore their part of the family in detail.

• Some cards show a small arrow above or below them. This means the tree has more ancestors or descendants for that person than are currently drawn. Click the arrow, or use the focus action in a person's side panel, to re-center the tree on them and reveal more of the family.
• A card can also show a small arrow to its side. This means the person had another marriage that is hidden because it sits too far from the person you are focused on. To keep distant branches from cluttering the chart, a several-generations-removed ancestor's remarriage and step-family stay hidden until you focus on that ancestor or their child. Click the side arrow to re-center on the person and reveal the other marriage.
• A breadcrumb trail at the top of the tree tracks the people you have focused through, so you can jump back to any of them.
• The person you are focused on is saved in the page's URL, so refreshing the page, using your browser's Back button, or sharing a link all take you back to that same person's tree.

The person side panel

Click a person's card to open a side panel about them. It shows:

• Their parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Each name is clickable, so you can move through the family.
• A timeline of their dated events.
• A Research section that scores how complete their profile is (see Spotting research gaps below).

From the panel you can:

• Open the person's full profile.
• Focus tree on them to re-center the whole chart.
• Click Ask Kleio to start a Research Companion conversation about them.

Colors and connector lines

• Cards are color-coded by gender: male, female, another gender (shown in green), and unknown (a neutral color).
• The lines connecting people show the type of relationship. Between partners, a solid line means married, a dashed line means divorced, and a dotted line means unmarried partners. Between a parent and child, a solid line means biological, a dashed line means adopted, and a dotted line means foster or another relationship.
• A legend on the canvas explains the card colors, the line styles, and the research markers. It starts collapsed. Click it to expand.
• Hover over any connector line to highlight it, so you can trace where it goes.
• When a person married more than once, each marriage sits on its own line at a slightly different height on their card, so it is clear which children belong to which marriage. The most recent marriage is drawn at the top and the earliest at the bottom.
• Cards follow the surname preference you set under Account & Preferences in settings, the same one the People list uses. If a person has a maiden (birth) name that differs from the surname shown on their card, it appears after their name as "(née ...)" in a lighter tint. The card, the side panel and the breadcrumb trail always show the same name.
• The tree is tuned for both light and dark mode.

When a person appears twice

When two people who married are also related by blood (for example, cousins who share ancestors that are both on the chart), one of them is drawn twice so the lines do not cross the whole tree: once next to their partner with their children, and once under their own parents on their own. A small "2x" badge marks both copies, or "3x" if someone appears three times. Click the badge to jump the view to the person's other copy on the chart, so you can see where else they sit. To re-center the whole tree on them (which redraws their children under whichever side you focus), click the expand arrow on either copy instead.

Spotting research gaps

The tree does more than draw what you know. It shows you where your research is thin, so you can see your next steps at a glance.

• Open a person's card and expand the Research section in their side panel. It scores the profile out of seven basics (name, birth date, birth place, death date, occupation, parents, and at least one linked record) and splits them into what is still Missing and what is already Documented, so you know exactly what to look for next. This completeness score is available on every plan.
• Where a person's parent is not recorded, the tree draws a dashed "Unknown father" or "Unknown mother" placeholder in the empty spot, so a missing parent is visible rather than silently absent. Click a placeholder to add that parent (see Add a relative from the canvas below).

On the Researcher plan and above, the tree also surfaces detected research findings:

• 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 yet.
• If KleioBase has detected findings for a person, such as a gap, a sparse profile, or a possible connection, they are listed in the Detected part of the Research section. Click one to open it in Insights.

On lower plans these findings appear as a locked preview with an option to upgrade. See Plans & Billing for what each plan includes. The completeness checklist above stays available to everyone.

Add a relative from the canvas

You can grow your tree without leaving it. Each person's card has a + button in its corner (it is hidden only when you are zoomed far out). Click it to open a quick-add menu with four options:

• Add parent (disabled once the person already has two recorded parents)
• Add spouse
• Add child
• Add sibling

Pick a relation and a short form opens where you enter the new person's name and details. When you save, KleioBase creates the profile and links it to the person you started from, and the new relative appears on the tree right away.

You can also click a dashed "Unknown father" or "Unknown mother" placeholder to add that missing parent directly into the empty slot.

Dating a marriage or other shared event

A marriage, engagement, or divorce belongs to the couple rather than to one person. On a person's profile, find the spouse under Family connections and choose the calendar button to add a date and place. The event then appears on both people's timelines, because it is stored once for the couple.

Export the tree

Use the export controls in the top-right corner of the canvas to save or share your tree. The export captures the whole chart as it is currently laid out - everything drawn around your focused person, not just the part visible on screen - and it comes out as a clean chart without the placeholder cards, arrows, or badges you see while working. To export a different part of a large family, focus the tree on that branch first.

• Download PNG saves the tree as an image, with the person's name and the date across the top.
• Download SVG saves it as a scalable vector file, which stays sharp at any size.
• Print opens your browser's print dialog so you can print the tree or save it as a PDF.

Export reflects your current light or dark mode, so the saved image matches how the tree looks on screen.

Where to go next

• Your Knowledge Base covers the people, records, places, and timeline behind the tree. To see your whole tree laid out across history by family line, rather than one person's branch, use the Timeline tab.
• Finding & Merging Duplicates helps when the same person shows up more than once.
• Research Companion can answer questions about anyone on the tree when you click Ask Kleio.