Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, completely free. No account, no paywall, no upselling. I'm a solo developer and a former hobbyist genealogist, and I built TreeAlive because I wanted to see where my own family actually lived. A few people have asked about a tip jar and I don't have one. The most useful thing you can give me is feedback on what works and what doesn't.

No. You upload your family file right in the browser and start exploring. If you'd rather not handle a file, you can sign in with FamilySearch instead and it reads your tree from there.

Any program that exports a standard GEDCOM file, which is nearly all of them: Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Geneanet, MacFamilyTree, and others. If yours doesn't load, email me the file and I'll usually have a fix the same day. See the step-by-step export guides.

Yes, small files work fine. Once your tree loads you can narrow it to Direct Ancestors (your direct line of parents and grandparents) or Full Family Tree (everyone, including siblings and cousins).

Yes. Sign in with FamilySearch and it reads your tree directly, with no download or upload needed. Here is how the direct connection works.

Your family file never leaves your browser. The whole tree is read and turned into map points on your own device, and nothing about the people in it is sent to a TreeAlive server. I built it this way on purpose, because family data is personal and I did not want to be holding it.

When you click sign in, FamilySearch shows you its own permission screen, so TreeAlive never sees your password. The only details I read are your display name, so the app can greet you, and the list of trees you own, so it knows which one to load. After that it reads only the ancestor and place data. Nothing is sent to a TreeAlive server, the connection is read-only, and the access token is gone the moment you close the tab.

No. Everything is read-only. I never write anything back to your FamilySearch tree or your file.

There are a few views. Video builds a downloadable animation of your family's migration over time. Journey is a guided walkthrough of one ancestor's life on era-appropriate maps. Time Machine lets you scrub through the years. Historic Crossings shows moments your ancestors shared a place and time with a famous figure. Location Quality Explorer shows every place on a still map so you can check the mapping.

Yes. Open the Video tab, pick a starting ancestor, and choose Record a Video. It builds an MP4 of your family's migration arcs over time. Enter your email and I'll send you the download link, and you also get a share link you can pass around.

Yes. Rather than showing a 1750 ancestor on a modern road grid, TreeAlive places them on a map from roughly their own time. In Journey and Time Machine a scorer picks the best historical map for each event by place, era, and detail. For a Scottish or Irish ancestor, for instance, it draws on National Library of Scotland and Irish county survey layers, so an 1888 event can land on the period Ordnance Survey sheet.

It surfaces moments when your ancestors and a well-known historical figure, like Lincoln, Franklin, or Lafayette, were in the same place around the same time. It is the most for-fun part of the app, though people tell me it sometimes turns up genuinely interesting overlaps.

Yes. The Location Quality Explorer shows all your locations on a subdued map with no animation. It is also where you check and report any places that look wrong.

Right now, the migration video shows movement over time with arcs between places. A few people have asked about an all-ancestors-in-parallel view with flow lines, or a single-ancestor descendants-over-time view. I can't promise either, but hearing what people want is how I decide what to look at, so let me know if that is what you are after.

TreeAlive turns each place name in your tree into a point on the map. It checks about two million offline place records first, from more than a dozen historical gazetteers (the USGS geographic names database, GeoNames, Victorian-era British places, Irish parishes and townlands, more than a hundred thousand historical US post offices, and others). Only if those cannot resolve a name does it fall through to mapping services, and last of all a small AI step for messy strings. The offline sources matter because they include thousands of places no modern map still indexes.

Usually one of three reasons. The place name is ambiguous and the geocoder picked the wrong one of several real places with that name (there are dozens of Springfields). The name was incomplete or mis-transcribed in the source record. Or the place in the record is itself wrong, or did not exist yet at that date. The first kind I can fix directly. The other two are worth a closer look at the record itself. Either way, the fix starts the same: flag it.

Open the Location Quality Explorer, or pause inside a Journey, click the bad point, and hit Report. That puts the original text, the coordinates, and how it was resolved in front of me. Nearly every accuracy fix I have shipped came from someone doing exactly that. When I fix one, I treat it as a permanent change to the pipeline and add a test, so the same mistake cannot quietly come back, rather than patching a single record.

They show how confident the geocoder is. Green is high confidence. Amber is medium, often a place I had to disambiguate from an ambiguous name. A hollow red ring is low confidence, and the one most worth double-checking against your own records.

Genealogy place data is full of dates that predate the place. A marriage recorded in Wilkes, North Carolina in 1766 is suspect, because that county was not formed until 1778. TreeAlive now uses the year on an event as a signal, drawing on a historical dataset of when each place existed, so an event that predates a place by decades will not be matched to it. It also leans toward the candidate nearest the rest of the family's events. This will not catch every anachronism, but a genealogist's rule of thumb, passed on to me by James Tanner, is that an event more than about six miles from someone's birth is worth a second look.

Not yet, and the reason is the privacy choice above: because your tree is processed only in your browser and never reaches my server, in-app editing needs a careful design so corrections stay on your device. It is something I want to add. For now, the Report button is the way to flag something, and I make the correction in the pipeline so it is fixed for you and everyone after you.

Coverage started US-heavy and is steadily widening. It is strongest in the US, with large collections for continental Europe, Canada, Australia, and the British Isles, and it is growing. Some regions sit behind expensive subscription archives that take time to work through. Coverage gaps are exactly the kind of thing I want flagged, because the demand signal is what tells me where to expand next.

Yes, up to a 30 MB file, which comfortably covers trees of several thousand people. Two honest heads-ups for large trees: mapping everyone takes a while on the first run, and you have to keep the browser tab in the foreground, because browsers throttle background tabs and that slows it to a crawl. Start it, leave the tab in front, and come back. A roughly 9,000-person tree is about the largest I know of that has been run through.

That used to be a real bug, where files over the size limit failed silently with no message. It is fixed, and the limit is now 30 MB. If a file still does not load, it is almost always something I can fix quickly. Email it to treealivefeedback@gmail.com and I will usually have a fix the same day.

If your file imports fine in other programs, that is on me, not you. One real example: MacFamilyTree writes files with an older Mac line ending that my parser was not reading, so it saw the whole file as one line and found nobody. That specific case is fixed. If you hit this, send me the file and I will dig in.

A few people have hit this, and the usual cause is the button being pushed off-screen at certain zoom levels or resolutions. Zooming your browser out usually reveals it. I am fixing the layout so it cannot happen. If unzooming does not work, tell me your browser and screen and I will sort it.

It does, and I work to keep it light enough to run in a phone browser. For a large tree, though, a computer is more comfortable, both for the screen space and because the mapping runs faster.

I test mainly on Chrome, Safari, and Edge. A couple of Firefox users hit layout quirks, which I am working through. If something looks off in your browser, let me know which one.

Email treealivefeedback@gmail.com, or use the in-app Report button for a specific location. I read everything and I fix fast. A good share of what is in the app changed because someone wrote in.

Not right now. It looks like a simple static site, but it leans on pieces I cannot bundle into a self-contained package: licensed historical map tiles tied to treealive.com, a geocoding pipeline that calls outside services, and the FamilySearch sign-in. If you want to fold TreeAlive into a family wiki or portal, the share links are the way: Time Machine videos, Journeys, and Crossings each generate a stable URL you can drop into a page, and every family member can make their own without sharing any files.

Just me. I'm a former hobbyist genealogist and a serious map geek, and I built the thing I wanted for exploring my own family. I did not expect this much interest, and the feedback has shaped nearly every part of it.