AP One-Place Studies

AP One-Place Studies is a WordPress-native home for a one-place study: the history of a parish, village, street or house told through the records of the people who lived there. Your data lives in your own WordPress database and can always be exported in full. No lock-in, ever - a study should outlive its author, and it only can if the data is truly yours. Built by AncestorPress - tools for family history, built to last. What You Can Do With the Free Version

• A searchable occurrence index - every appearance of a name in a source, filterable by name, record type, year range and place. The thing a blog cannot do
• CSV import with reusable mapping templates - prebuilt layouts for FreeBMD, UK census returns, parish registers and monumental inscriptions; save your own template for any source. Every import is a record set you can reverse as a unit
• Every person in a record - a baptism records the child and both parents, a marriage the couple and every witness, each findable in their own right
• As-recorded discipline - the original spelling, date and place string are stored verbatim, never overwritten; standardised values sit alongside with precision indicators, always correctable
• Place, street and property pages - a place hierarchy from the study place down to individual buildings, with occupancy over time
• Household views - a census household as a unit, traceable across census years
• A surname index - auto-generated, with spelling grouping
• Privacy that fails closed - a configurable living-person cutoff (default 100 years) on every public page; anything undated or inside the window is never displayed
• Map embeds - frame your study place with an embedded map from OpenStreetMap, uMap, Google My Maps or the NLS historic mapping, entirely optional
• Complete CSV export - every field of every record, including your as-recorded originals, plus the place hierarchy
• Archive export for preservation and handover - one ZIP holding the whole study as documented JSON plus flat CSVs and a plain-English README, built so your study outlives you and your platform

This free plugin is the complete home of a one-place study: the studied place, its records, people, households and public pages. All current editions manage one place study per WordPress site. A Pro edition with additional functionality (study roles with a contributor review queue, the compiled Study Report, archive restore, AI import assistance and research suggestion tools) is obtained from ancestorpress.com and installed as the paid build of the plugin - its code is not part of this free package.

Who It Is For One-place studies reconstruct a community: everyone who appears in a place's records, not one family's line. If you are documenting a parish, village, hamlet, street or house - for the Society for One-Place Studies, a local history group, or your own fascination - this gives your study a permanent, searchable, publishable home you own. We are listening AP One-Place Studies is new. We have built it with care and with respect for the discipline, but one-place study is a deep field with conventions we may not have caught. If we have missed something that matters to your study, we would rather hear it than not - tell us via ancestorpress.com. (For troubleshooting, please use the WordPress.org support forum.) More from AncestorPress AP One-Place Studies 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 - publish beautiful, interactive family trees: charts and member profiles on any page. Shares its data core with One-Place Studies, so the same database serves both.
• AP One-Name Studies - the same care applied to a surname study: one registered surname, its spellings, occurrence index, maps and public pages.
• 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.

Third-party libraries This plugin bundles the following open-source libraries. All are GPL-compatible.

• php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson - MIT licence. A namespaced GEDCOM library bundled with the shared AncestorPress core, used by the suite's GEDCOM services.
• Freemius WordPress SDK by Freemius - MIT licence. Used for licence management on the Pro plan.

Privacy and data This plugin does not collect or transmit any personal data from your site or your visitors to us. All study data is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database. The optional public contact form emails enquiries to the study contact address you set, and nowhere else. If you configure a map embed, your visitors' browsers load that map from the provider you chose; no map is loaded until you set one. This plugin bundles the Freemius SDK for licensing and update management. What it does, and when:

• On activation Freemius may show a one-time opt-in screen. Opting in sends basic environment and account information - your site URL, WordPress and PHP versions, and the email address you enter - to Freemius so it can provide update notices and support. This opt-in is optional: click Skip and the plugin stays fully functional; nothing is transmitted, and no licence activation is required to use the free plugin.
• If you buy and activate a Pro licence the SDK contacts Freemius to validate the licence and deliver Pro updates.
• Your study data and your visitors' data are never sent to Freemius.

Freemius's terms and privacy policy: Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

1. Upload the plugin ZIP via Plugins > Add New > Upload, or unzip into /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate.
3. Go to AP One-Place Studies in the admin menu and set up your study - the studied place, its scope and your living-person cutoff.
4. Import your first transcription (Import tab) or enter records by hand (Records tab), then publish the study profile page when you are ready to go public.

For full documentation, visit ancestorpress.com.

1.0

• First release.
• Study setup: the studied place, scope statement, timeframe, contact and living-person cutoff; public study profile page with an auto-generated record inventory.
• CSV import with column matching, saveable reusable templates, prebuilt FreeBMD, census, parish register and memorial inscription layouts, and a source-level "Date all rows as" default; every import is a reversible record set.
• Records capture every person a source names, with their role - parents, spouses, witnesses.
• Keyboard-first manual record entry with sticky context fields.
• Place hierarchy (study place, streets, properties) with occupancy listings; recorded place spellings preserved verbatim.
• Publishing: searchable occurrence index, surname index with spelling grouping, record-type pages, place pages, household views, optional map embeds, and an optional contact form that emails the study owner without revealing the address - all with living-person suppression.
• Export: CSV per record type, full CSV, place hierarchy CSV, and the archive/handover ZIP with documented JSON and a preservation README.