AP Family Research

AP Family Research is a private workbench for the part of family history that comes before the conclusion: unfiled certificates and photos, years of spreadsheets, notebook pages, conjectures, brick walls and the searches that found nothing. Capture it quickly, organise it around the questions you are trying to answer, keep an honest research log, and promote a proven conclusion into your family tree with its evidence attached. Private by definition. There are no public pages, shortcodes, blocks or other front-end output, and every screen is for administrators. Your research stays in your own database and media library; nothing reaches your tree unless you promote it. Free features No cap on what you record and no time limit.

• Capture - phone camera, single or bulk upload, and an inbox to file or discard items later. Nothing is required at capture, and related files (such as the front and back of a photo) can be kept as one item.
• Spreadsheet import - map CSV columns to artefact fields; every row becomes an artefact.
• Artefact store - types, tags, search and links to people in your tree. Transcriptions are stored exactly as typed, separate from your comments, with optional Mills evidence fields.
• Research questions - questions, conjectures and brick walls, with your reasoning, a plan, and evidence for, against or neutral.
• Research log - when and where you searched, what you sought and what came of it. Negative results are first-class entries, and repeating a search warns you.
• Tasks by repository - to-do lists grouped by place, including plan steps.
• Promotion - turn a proven conclusion into a fact on a person in your tree, with the chosen artefacts attached as media and cited as sources.
• Full export - one .tar archive with every table as CSV, every original file with a readable description, a dossier per question and a note for whoever inherits your research.

Pro edition A separate edition sold at ancestorpress.com and installed in place of this plugin; its code is not in this package. It adds AI transcription, extraction with link suggestions, question analysis and classification; duplicate detection with merges you approve; natural-language search; a brick-wall board, a research timeline and a printable dossier. The AI features use your own WordPress AI connector (WordPress 7.0 or later) at your own cost, and ask for consent before sending anything linked to a living person. More from AncestorPress AP Family Research is one of a small family of AncestorPress tools for family history research. Each works on its own, all are free on WordPress.org, and they share one data core - so a conclusion you promote here appears in the others with no re-import:

• AP Family Trees - beautiful, interactive family tree charts and member profiles on any page. This is where a promoted conclusion shows up, with its citation attached.
• AP Family Archive - publish your family history as a complete website: a person page for every ancestor, family group pages, a surname index and full search, with living people protected automatically.
• 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.

Linking people and promoting conclusions need a family tree in that shared data, for example one imported with AP Family Trees. Everything else here works on its own. Third-party libraries

• php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson - MIT, bundled with the shared AncestorPress core.
• Freemius WordPress SDK - GPLv3; release 2.13.4 with a small local PHP 8 fix.

1.0.1

• Hardening: every form field and upload the plugin receives, including the Help assistant's conversation, is now checked and cleaned as it arrives. Spreadsheet cells are cleaned the same way as the edit form. Transcriptions are still stored exactly as typed.

1.0.0

• Initial release: capture, spreadsheet import, artefact store, research questions, research log, tasks, promotion into your tree and full export.
• An optional Help assistant, described under External services.