Oakbough Family is a fast desktop app for tracing your family. Everyone you add is saved as a plain, readable text file on your own computer β no database to corrupt, no format to get stuck in. No account, nothing trapped in the cloud.
Pre-release 0.11 β Windows first; Linux and macOS are on the way.
No hidden database. Your whole family history is plain text files and your own photos in one folder. The app decides WHERE that folder lives β so you never have to make a decision about network drives before you have seen a single person β but it hides nothing: the path is in Settings, the files open whenever you like, and GEDCOM export is always one click away.
You pick one folder for copies β ideally on another drive β and the app does the rest: a copy when you close it, the last ten kept, and every one reopened afterwards to count whether your notes really are inside. A copy is lossless (it never anonymizes or simplifies anything), and restoring creates a SEPARATE archive, so the one you work in is never overwritten.
Already have a tree in Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Gramps, Ancestry or MyHeritage? It imports in seconds, sources, dates and places included β and the places become real records with coordinates straight away. A plain spreadsheet of people (CSV) works too. And GEDCOM export is always right there β in the free version as well.
A tree with portraits, a living graph of connections, a map that traces each life, a timeline of generations β and a snapshot of any year: who was alive in, say, 1880, and in which household. All offline, and it doesn't slow down even with tens of thousands of people.
Your villages are found without internet. Install the historical border packs and the map changes with the time slider β events from 1790 sit inside the borders of 1790. Two villages with the same name stay two separate places, not one βwinnerβ of the name. Mark the old church, mill or manor yourself, and export any view as a crisp SVG.
Church books rarely say β21 April 1782β. More often it's βDominica III post Paschaβ. Oakbough Family reads feast-day dates in Latin and Polish, understands double years like β1 Mar 1740/41β, and keeps what the scribe wrote β yet still sorts it and puts it on the map.
Every fact can carry its source and a confidence level, and the citation comes ready to paste, in Evidence Explained or Chicago style. And the research log remembers where you've already looked β including the searches that found nothing β so next year you don't dig through the same books twice.
A panel of its own reads the whole archive and tells you what doesn't add up: a death before a birth, a child born after a parent's death, a dated fact outside a person's lifetime, likely duplicate people and places, a link that leads nowhere, two notes claiming one identity. It also names the files it could not read, instead of quietly pretending they aren't there.
The whole archive in one searchable table: people, places, sources, research questions. Ready-made queries like βpeople with no birth dateβ, your own conditions joined with AND and OR, pick-your-own columns, CSV export. For finding the gaps before a trip to the archives, there's no better view.
The most interesting names in old records are often not family at all. Record who held the child at the font and who witnessed the wedding β they show up on the tree and the graph as real connections, and they survive GEDCOM round-trips. And a couple gets more than a wedding: an engagement, banns, a marriage contract, a separation, a shared census entry, or an event you name yourself.
Attach portraits and document scans to people and sources. Tag the faces in a group photo and each person gets their own portrait crop from it β it follows them into the tree, their card and the family website.
Seven kinds of PDF: a family sheet, ancestor and descendant lists, pedigree and fan charts, a full person profile. Plus a complete family book with its own name index β just the thing for the table at a reunion.
One click and your tree becomes a small private website: a clickable chart, a page for every person, your photos, living relatives kept anonymous. Send the family a ZIP β no app or account needed to look.
No telemetry, no account, nothing leaves your computer. People who are probably still living are hidden by default in EVERY export β GEDCOM, PDF reports, the family website, even the tree and map images β so a file you send a cousin doesn't carry your living family with it. Backups are the opposite: always complete, because their job is to rescue, not to publish.
Warm parchment and ink, a quiet serif for the names that matter, light and dark themes. More family chronicle than spreadsheet. The interface speaks English, Polish, German, French and Spanish.
We don't ask you where to put a folder β you give your archive a NAME, the app creates it and shows you the full path in Settings. Inside there is nothing mysterious: every person is one Markdown note, the key facts up top, your own story below, family ties as simple links. Filenames are stable ids β I1.md β so a changed surname never breaks a link β the name itself is in the note's first lines. Open one in any text editor, today or in thirty years.
Kowalski/ β the archive you named βββ Persons/ I1.md β one note per person βββ Places/ L1.md β places with their coordinates βββ Sources/ S1.md β the records your facts come from βββ Research/ Q1.md β open questions & what you've tried βββ Media/ jan-portrait.jpg β photos and document scans βββ vocab.toml β your own kinds of events
The core app is free forever β no person limits, nothing expires. The researcher's workbench (PRO) unlocks with one payment, once, for good: no subscription, no account. And your files are plain text either way β everything you've written stays readable, whichever you choose.
$0 forever
An unlimited tree and editing, the living graph, the world map with life journeys and a time slider, the timeline, any-year snapshots, statistics, Archive Health (contradictions, duplicates, unreadable files), backups, and GEDCOM import and export. Never expires, never takes anything away.
Early access β $59.99 later
$29.99 one-time
The researcher's workbench: sources and ready-to-paste citations, the research log, Research Health, the query workbench, PDF reports and the family book, the family-website export, historical maps and former place names, your archive's own calendar. A perpetual license for the whole 1.x line, on up to 3 computers β and you can try PRO free for 30 days in the app first.
Purchase β coming soon
The store opens shortly. Want to know the day it does? Write to contact@oakbough.com.
Purchases are handled by Paddle, our merchant of record; prices are shown in your local currency and include VAT or sales tax where it applies. Your licence key appears the moment you pay, on the confirmation page β copy it and keep it safe. The early-access price runs for a launch window β afterwards PRO costs $59.99.
Oakbough Family is pre-release: the app works and is in daily use, but the 1.0 badge waits for the day the store opens. The Windows installer needs no administrator rights and installs for your account only.
On first run Windows will show a SmartScreen prompt β it is not a virus warning. Click βMore infoβ β βRun anywayβ; the questions below explain why it appears.
No β that's the whole point. Your family history lives as plain, readable Markdown files, with a standard GEDCOM export on top that any other genealogy program will read. If Oakbough Family vanished tomorrow, you'd still have everything.
In a folder the app creates under its own data directory β we don't ask you at the start, because βpick a folderβ is a decision nobody can make well before they've seen the program. You give the archive a name (βKowalskiβ), and the full path is in Settings for you to do whatever you like with. The only folder question you'll hear is where to keep your backups.
The app copies your archive when you close it (into the folder you chose), keeps the last ten and verifies each one after making it. Restoring a copy creates a separate archive, so it never overwrites the one you work in. On top of that, anything that could overwrite β a replacing import, a mass rename β asks first and moves the old notes into a dated backup folder. And if you have git installed, you also get the History panel with a snapshot after every save.
Fully offline β the world map and place index are built in. Looking places up online is strictly opt-in. The app sends no telemetry, and this website sets no cookies.
Comfortably into the tens of thousands. The import pipeline, the map and the Registry are exercised on generated 20,000β30,000-person trees in the test suite, and the views stay responsive β the map simply clusters pins until you zoom in, and βshow me everyone at onceβ views offer a narrower scope instead of choking.
The core app is free forever β no person limits, no trial clock, nothing expires: the tree, editing, the graph, the map with life journeys, the timeline, Archive Health, backups, and GEDCOM both ways. The researcher's workbench (sources and citations, the research log, the query workbench, PDF reports, the family website, historical maps) is the PRO pack: a single $29.99 purchase at the early-access price ($59.99 later) β no subscription of any kind. The license is perpetual for the whole 1.x line, covers up to 3 of your computers, and you can try PRO free for 30 days inside the app first. A future 2.0 β years away β will be a separate, optional upgrade with a discount for 1.x owners; your 1.x keeps working indefinitely.
It is not a virus warning β SmartScreen is saying βI don't know this fileβ. It trusts programs based on how many people have downloaded them and whether the publisher holds a certificate; a new program from a one-person author has neither yet. Click βMore infoβ β βRun anywayβ. Oakbough Family installs for your account only, never asks for administrator rights, and sends nothing to the internet. We will buy a publisher certificate once the program has enough downloads for it to mean something β bought today it would not remove this screen a day sooner.
Windows first. The app is built cross-platform, so Linux (.deb/AppImage) and macOS (.dmg) installers are on the roadmap.