About Family Archive
Family history belongs with the families who preserve it.
Family Archive is an open-source project for building private, self-hosted family archives around photographs, documents, stories and the people who connect them.
Why Family Archive exists
Family history often ends up scattered across photo folders, genealogy services, scanned documents, cloud drives, old albums and the memories of different relatives.
Family Archive is an attempt to bring that material together without turning the family tree itself into the entire product. Genealogy provides context and navigation. The archive material is the reason the people are there.
Photos show the people. Documents preserve the evidence. Stories provide the context. Genealogy connects them.
Built for private family archives
Family Archive is designed for archives shared with relatives rather than public genealogy databases or large social networks.
SELF-HOSTED
You choose where it runs.
Family Archive runs on WordPress and can be hosted on infrastructure you control or choose yourself.
PRIVATE
Family material is not automatically public.
Protected media storage and controlled access are central parts of the archive model.
OPEN SOURCE
The software remains open.
The public source code can be inspected, studied, improved and redistributed under its open-source licence.
Material first, genealogy second
There are already excellent tools for building very large family trees. Family Archive has a different emphasis.
A person in JFA becomes especially useful when there is something to preserve around them: photographs, letters, records, albums, memories, sources or other archive material.
Photographs
Portraits, family photographs, places, gravestones and other visual material connected to people and events.
Documents
Letters, certificates, records, newspaper clippings, PDFs and multi-part archive material.
People & relationships
Genealogy gives the archive structure so relatives can understand who the material belongs to and how people are connected.
A project that can be inspected
Family Archive is developed in public. Codeberg is the primary source repository and release home, with a GitHub mirror available as an additional way to find and follow the project.
Ways to contribute
Writing code is only one way to make an open-source project better. Real-world experience is especially valuable for software that handles different hosting environments, family workflows and genealogy exports.
Report a reproducible bug
A clear report that reliably exposes a problem can save hours of guesswork and improve the software for everyone.
Test real workflows
Try installation, GEDCOM imports, photographs, documents, family accounts and different server environments.
Improve documentation
Corrections, clearer explanations and examples are useful contributions even when no source code changes.
Contribute code
Developers can inspect the repository, discuss changes and submit improvements through the public project workflow.
SUPPORTING THE PROJECT
There is no paid edition.
Family Archive does not reserve features for paying users. Financial support, when offered, is optional and helps with practical project costs such as domains, hosting and the public demo.
Money is not the only useful contribution. Testing, bug reports, documentation and code can be equally valuable — and sometimes considerably more valuable.
About the public demo
The public JFA demo is designed to show what a populated family archive can look like without exposing anyone’s real family history.
The demo family is fictional.
Names, genealogy, dates, portraits, archive documents and other demo material are created specifically for demonstrating Family Archive. They do not represent a real family archive.
This makes it possible to demonstrate people, relationships, photographs, documents, provenance, albums and family workflows openly without publishing private family information.
The project is still developing
Family Archive is actively developed. Release candidates may expose rough edges, and features will continue to evolve as the project is tested with more real-world archive workflows.
The goal is not to become the largest genealogy platform. It is to become a useful, understandable and trustworthy home for the family material people want to preserve.
EXPLORE FAMILY ARCHIVE
See what JFA can do.
Explore the features, read the documentation or try the public demo.