About PrintFamilyTree

PrintFamilyTree started with a real family tree: two hundred years of records from a handful of villages in south-eastern Poland, kept in a genealogy program and exported, again and again, to every chart tool we could find. Every one of them produced the same problems. Boxes overlapped when a family had more than four children. A grandfather who married twice appeared twice, sometimes on opposite sides of the page. Lines crossed each other for no reason the data demanded. Printing the result was embarrassing.

So we wrote a layout engine specifically for genealogical data. It orders every generation so that connecting lines do not need to cross, keeps couples together, hangs children under their parents in birth order, and treats overlapping boxes as something that must never happen rather than as a warning. Then it computes the exact positions with a constraint solver, so that a line to an only child is straight and the picture is as compact as the lines allow. The results are the charts you see on this site, generated from a sample file without a single manual adjustment.

The second half of the project is the book. Family historians spend years collecting facts and sources, and most of that work never leaves the database. A family history book is the way to hand it on, but writing the skeleton by hand, entry by entry, footnote by footnote, is what stops most people. The generator does that part. The stories are still yours to write.

What we believe

• Your data is yours. GEDCOM is an open standard and we keep it that way: upload, generate, download, delete.
• Paper still matters. A chart on the wall and a book on the shelf outlast every website, including this one.
• Correctness before decoration. A chart must first be right; then it can be beautiful.

Where we are

The layout engine is complete and tested on real files from Ancestry, MyHeritage and Family Tree Maker as well as on thousands of generated families. The book generator and the online editor are being finished. Leave your e-mail address on the home page and we will tell you when the service opens.

Questions, ideas, a tricky GEDCOM file that breaks every tool you tried? Write to hello@printfamilytree.com. We read everything.