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 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.
Full history: see changelog.txt in the plugin folder.
1.0.0
- First WordPress.org release.
- The support assistant answers locally on the AI provider set in WordPress (7.0+), no account or licence; the optional support service is consent-gated.
- Every query is a placeholder-bound prepared statement; nonce checks on public filters and the admin tree switcher; extension-seam markup is sanitised to plain form controls.
- GEDCOM parser hardening: imports log nothing under WP_DEBUG. Tested up to WordPress 7.1.
- Distinctive apfaar_ prefix on all code identifiers; options and shortcodes from earlier builds migrate on update.