About Kin Tree
A living archive of your family's people, places and stories.
Why this project exists
Every family has a quiet archive: the aunt who remembers every birthday, the shoebox of photographs in a grandparent's cupboard, the stories told at the table that nobody ever wrote down. When those people are gone, the archive goes with them — names slip, faces in photos become strangers, and whole branches of a family fade into "I think they came from somewhere near…".
Kin Tree was created to stop that quiet loss. It is a place where a family — not a single genealogist, but the whole family — builds its tree together: parents, partners, children, the marriages and the remarriages, the adoptions, the places lived, the photographs, the documents and the stories behind them. Relatives are invited as collaborators, each person can claim their own card, and separate family trees can be connected where families meet.
Your memories remain yours
Most photo and genealogy services ask you to upload your family's most personal records onto their servers, and your archive lives — and dies — with their business. Kin Tree deliberately works differently:
📁 Media lives in the owner's own Google Drive
When you add a photo, video or document, it is uploaded into a "Kin Tree Media" folder in your own Google Drive — not onto Kin Tree's servers. You can open the folder, see every file, and a sharing log inside it records exactly who it is shared with.
🔒 Shared privately with family, read-only
Your media is automatically shared with your tree's collaborators as read-only. You keep full ownership and write access; family members can view, not alter or delete.
🤝 Ownership can be passed on, never taken
If you ever leave, you can offer your media to another family member. Only when they accept do the files move into their Drive and become theirs to steward. Nothing is ever silently copied or retained.
The result: even if Kin Tree disappeared tomorrow, every family member would still hold their own photographs, videos and documents, in their own Drive, organised and intact.
What Kin Tree offers
- An interactive family tree — couples, multiple marriages, adoptions, and colour-coded family lines, with list and world-map views.
- Collaboration by invitation, with roles (owner, editor, viewer).
- Connected families — link your tree to your in-laws' tree and view all families together.
- Private messaging between family members.
- Profile photos and per-person galleries of photos, videos and documents.
- Printable PDF exports of your tree in a choice of styles.
- Free to use; available on the web and as an Android app.