AP Family Archive

Popis

AP Family Archive turns your genealogy research into a complete, self-hosted family history website: a person page for every ancestor, a family group page for every couple, a surname index, and full search – cross-linked, with sources cited and living people protected automatically. Your data lives in your own WordPress database and can always be exported in full as GEDCOM.

Built by AncestorPress – family history tools, built to last.

Free version

  • GEDCOM import (all standard GEDCOM 5.5 exporters)
  • Person pages – vitals exactly as recorded, a life timeline, parents, spouses and children
  • Family group pages – partners, marriage details, and children in birth order
  • Surname index with bearer counts and A-Z browse
  • Full search by name (sounds-like option), year range, and place
  • Sources and citations – source detail pages and per-fact citation markers
  • Media on person and family pages – portraits, galleries and listing thumbnails
  • A family history hub – headline stats, „what’s new“, anniversaries, a most-wanted list, and a place index
  • Text reports – Ahnentafel (ancestor) and d’Aboville (descendant) numbered reports
  • Branch definitions – describe family branches from the admin screen
  • Living-person privacy that cannot be switched off – never shown to visitors
  • Full GEDCOM export – take your complete data back at any time
  • One-click pages – the archive views are shortcodes on ordinary pages, created as drafts, so they work with any theme
  • Support assistant – answers locally on the AI provider set in WordPress (7.0+), or via the optional support service

Pro

The Pro package (a separate download for licence holders) adds:

  • Tree-wide media index and document viewer – browse every photo and document in the archive, with transcription display
  • Cemeteries and headstones – headstone images surfaced on person pages
  • „Download this branch“ – let visitors export a privacy-filtered GEDCOM subset for a chosen person and generation depth
  • Branch-scoped public display – let visitors browse and filter the whole site by branch
  • Relationship calculator – „how are they related?“, with familiar cousin-and-removed wording
  • Multiple trees on one site, with a visitor tree switcher and per-tree page URLs
  • Advanced search – sex, event type, and name-match operators
  • Saved reports and PDF output
  • Contributor workflow – editor and contributor roles, a front-end „suggest a correction“ box, and an audit trail
  • TNG importer – import a tree directly from an existing The Next Generation (TNG) database

More from AncestorPress

AP Family Archive is one of a small family of AncestorPress tools for publishing family history research. Each works on its own, and all are free on WordPress.org:

  • AP Family Trees – beautiful, interactive family tree charts and member profiles on any page. Trees and Archive share one data core – install either or both; the same people appear in each with no re-import.
  • AP Family Research – the private workbench behind the published tree: capture certificates, photos and notes as artefacts, work your research questions, and log every search, including the ones that found nothing. Nothing it holds is ever published; a proven conclusion is promoted into the same shared data core with its citations attached, so it appears in your Family Archive pages.
  • AP One-Name Studies – give a one-name study a home on your own site: surname variants and deviants, a searchable occurrence index, and historic-county distribution maps.
  • AP One-Place Studies – give a one-place study a home on your own site: the records of a parish, village, street or house as a searchable occurrence index, place and household pages, and full export.

Third-party libraries

  • php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson – MIT licence. GEDCOM reading and writing.
  • Freemius WordPress SDK by Freemius – GPLv3. Licence management for the Pro plan; official 2.13.4 release with a one-line PHP 8 fix noted in vendor/freemius/start.php.

Privacy and data

Your family history data is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, nor does the name of the tree you publish. Nothing about your visitors is collected. Two optional services can receive limited non-genealogical information, only when you choose to use them – see External services below.

External services

1. Freemius (licensing, checkout and optional diagnostics)

AP Family Archive uses the Freemius SDK, from Freemius, Inc., for optional account connection, licence administration, checkout and optional usage diagnostics. Updates to this free package are supplied by WordPress.org. This free plugin does not download, install or update the separately distributed Pro package.

When data may be transmitted: when you opt in to the activation flow, connect or manage an account or licence, use checkout, or consent to optional usage diagnostics.

What may be transmitted: broad account and installation information such as the site URL, the administrator email address you provide, plugin and WordPress version data, and licence identifiers. Opting in is optional – you can skip it and every free feature keeps working.

Your genealogical data is never sent to Freemius: no person, family, event, source or media record, and not the name of the tree you publish.

Terms of service: https://freemius.com/terms/
Privacy policy: https://freemius.com/privacy/

2. AncestorPress Support Service (optional support assistant)

The Help button on the plugin’s admin screens opens a support assistant. Nothing is sent until you open it and accept the privacy notice inside it.

With an AI provider set in WordPress, questions are answered locally on that provider: your question and chat history stay on your site; the assistant only fetches product documentation from the AncestorPress Support Service at bwtlsupport.com (operated by Black and White Trading Ltd), sending your site address and plugin version. No account, token or licence is needed for local answering.

When the support service answers instead (no local AI provider, or you connected the service), it also receives your question and recent chat history, your site address and – where available – its licence installation identifier (for authorising that service and fair-use limits), installed AncestorPress plugin versions, the admin screen identifier, and a short whitelist of non-sensitive settings, kept only as aggregated statistics. Ordinary questions are processed transiently, not retained.

Your genealogical data is never sent on either path: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, nor the name of the tree you publish. Passwords and API keys are never collected; the assistant is read-only.

Escalation: only if you open the ticket form („Send to support“ or „Still need to raise a ticket?“) and click „Create ticket“ does the plugin send the conversation (up to its 20 most recent messages), the same site and diagnostic details a service-answered question carries, the question category, the contact email address you enter (pre-filled with your WordPress account email) and the first and last name from your WordPress user profile. These are retained so a support agent can reply.

Terms of service: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy policy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/

Snímky obrazovky

Instalace

  1. Install from Plugins > Add New and activate.
  2. Go to AP Family Archive and choose the tree to publish (or import a GEDCOM first from the Import/Export screen).
  3. Click „Make the pages for me“, then review and publish the draft pages.

Nejčastější dotazy

Will living relatives appear on the site?

No. Anyone flagged as living or private is never rendered to visitors; family listings show only a neutral „Living“ placeholder. Enforced in the shared data core; cannot be disabled from the admin screen.

Will it change or „clean up“ my data?

Never. Dates and places display exactly as recorded in your GEDCOM; standardised values are used only for sorting and search, stored separately from your original text.

Is my family data stored on my own server?

Yes. All genealogical data stays in your WordPress database – no record is ever transmitted anywhere. The two optional services that can receive limited non-genealogical information are itemised under External services below; neither is required.

Can I export my data?

Yes. Full GEDCOM export is included in the free version – take your complete data to any genealogy application at any time.

Can I publish more than one tree?

The free version publishes one tree at a time (changeable at any point); Pro publishes several trees together on one site.

Does it work with AP Family Trees?

Yes – they share one data core: import in either plugin and both publish the same people. Run Archive on its own or alongside Trees.

Where do I get support?

Use the support forum here on WordPress.org, or the in-plugin Help assistant: with an AI provider configured in WordPress it answers locally (no account or connection needed); the optional support service can also answer and reach human support.

How do I upgrade from Free to Pro?

Purchase a licence from the Upgrade tab, then download and install the Pro package (premium features are not contained in this free plugin); settings and all genealogical data are kept as the Pro build replaces the free one in place. This free plugin never downloads or installs the Pro package itself.

Recenze

Pro tento plugin nejsou žádné recenze.

Autoři

AP Family Archive je otevřený software. Následující lidé přispěli k vývoji tohoto pluginu.

Spolupracovníci

Přehled změn

Full history: see changelog.txt in the plugin folder.

1.0.1

  • Privacy: on a free site the support assistant no longer offers to raise a support ticket. It previously did, and creating one sent the conversation, the diagnostic snapshot, the contact email address you entered and your WordPress first and last name – which the support service then declined, because free-plugin support is handled on the WordPress.org forum. Nothing ticket-only now leaves a free site. A reply carrying no ticket number is no longer shown as a created ticket either.
  • Security: the support assistant sends the conversation as separate form fields and sanitises each one as it is read, rather than decoding it from a single combined value; and each request proves its security token and your permission as two separate checks.
  • Changed: the support assistant’s privacy notice and ticket form now state that the contact email address and your WordPress first and last name are sent with a ticket. Both were always sent; only the wording was incomplete, and the readme already said so.
  • Import: a GEDCOM import that could not complete now says so, instead of reporting a clean finish; imported records honour the privacy settings you chose; and place and record-set handling is corrected.
  • No change to your tree data, to how records display, or to what is stored.