Description
AP Family Archive turns your genealogy research into a complete, self-hosted family history website: a person page for every ancestor, a family group page for every couple, a surname index, and full search – cross-linked, with sources cited and living people protected automatically. Your data lives in your own WordPress database and can always be exported in full as GEDCOM.
Built by AncestorPress – family history tools, built to last.
Free version
- GEDCOM import (all standard GEDCOM 5.5 exporters)
- Person pages – vitals exactly as recorded, a life timeline, parents, spouses and children
- Family group pages – partners, marriage details, and children in birth order
- Surname index with bearer counts and A-Z browse
- Full search by name (sounds-like option), year range, and place
- Sources and citations – source detail pages and per-fact citation markers
- Media on person and family pages – portraits, galleries and listing thumbnails
- A family history hub – headline stats, “what’s new”, anniversaries, a most-wanted list, and a place index
- Text reports – Ahnentafel (ancestor) and d’Aboville (descendant) numbered reports
- Branch definitions – describe family branches from the admin screen
- Living-person privacy that cannot be switched off – never shown to visitors
- Full GEDCOM export – take your complete data back at any time
- One-click pages – the archive views are shortcodes on ordinary pages, created as drafts, so they work with any theme
- Support assistant – answers locally on the AI provider set in WordPress (7.0+), or via the optional support service
Pro
The Pro package (a separate download for licence holders) adds:
- Tree-wide media index and document viewer – browse every photo and document in the archive, with transcription display
- Cemeteries and headstones – headstone images surfaced on person pages
- “Download this branch” – let visitors export a privacy-filtered GEDCOM subset for a chosen person and generation depth
- Branch-scoped public display – let visitors browse and filter the whole site by branch
- Relationship calculator – “how are they related?”, with familiar cousin-and-removed wording
- Multiple trees on one site, with a visitor tree switcher and per-tree page URLs
- Advanced search – sex, event type, and name-match operators
- Saved reports and PDF output
- Contributor workflow – editor and contributor roles, a front-end “suggest a correction” box, and an audit trail
- TNG importer – import a tree directly from an existing The Next Generation (TNG) database
More from AncestorPress
AP Family Archive 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 – beautiful, interactive family tree charts and member profiles on any page. Trees and Archive share one data core – install either or both; the same people appear in each with no re-import.
- AP Family Research – the private workbench behind the published tree: capture certificates, photos and notes as artefacts, work your research questions, and log every search, including the ones that found nothing. Nothing it holds is ever published; a proven conclusion is promoted into the same shared data core with its citations attached, so it appears in your Family Archive pages.
- AP One-Name Studies – give a one-name study a home on your own site: surname variants and deviants, a searchable occurrence index, and historic-county distribution maps.
- AP One-Place Studies – give a one-place study a home on your own site: the records of a parish, village, street or house as a searchable occurrence index, place and household pages, and full export.
Third-party libraries
- php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson – MIT licence. GEDCOM reading and writing.
- Freemius WordPress SDK by Freemius – GPLv3. Licence management for the Pro plan; official 2.13.4 release with a one-line PHP 8 fix noted in vendor/freemius/start.php.
Privacy and data
Your family history data is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, nor does the name of the tree you publish. Nothing about your visitors is collected. Two optional services can receive limited non-genealogical information, only when you choose to use them – see External services below.
External services
1. Freemius (licensing, checkout and optional diagnostics)
AP Family Archive uses the Freemius SDK, from Freemius, Inc., for optional account connection, licence administration, checkout and optional usage diagnostics. Updates to this free package are supplied by WordPress.org. This free plugin does not download, install or update the separately distributed Pro package.
When data may be transmitted: when you opt in to the activation flow, connect or manage an account or licence, use checkout, or consent to optional usage diagnostics.
What may be transmitted: broad account and installation information such as the site URL, the administrator email address you provide, plugin and WordPress version data, and licence identifiers. Opting in is optional – you can skip it and every free feature keeps working.
Your genealogical data is never sent to Freemius: no person, family, event, source or media record, and not the name of the tree you publish.
Terms of service: https://freemius.com/terms/
Privacy policy: https://freemius.com/privacy/
2. AncestorPress Support Service
Purpose: the optional Help assistant, the AncestorPress Support Copilot, answers questions about using the plugin. Where an AI provider is connected in WordPress (Settings > Connectors), that provider answers first, at your own cost, and the AncestorPress Support Service, provided by Black and White Trading Ltd, supplies the matching documentation; if that provider cannot answer and the site is connected to the service, the assistant automatically falls back to the service. Where none is connected, the service answers a few questions a month itself, free. The assistant is read-only.
When: nothing is sent until an administrator opens the assistant and accepts its privacy notice. The acceptance is recorded with who gave it and when, and can be withdrawn on the Support tab.
Answered by your own AI provider: your question and chat history go only to that provider. The service is asked only for documentation, and receives the site address, the plugin and its version, the admin screen, and any Freemius installation ID or support token – never your question.
Answered by the service (no AI provider connected, or your AI provider’s answer failed – in either case only when the site is connected through the Freemius opt-in or a support token on the Support tab): the question and up to 20 recent chat messages; the site address and any Freemius installation ID or support token, to authorise the request; this plugin’s version, the versions of other active plugins whose folders begin “ap-” or “ancp-“, the admin screen, and whether a GEDCOM dataset is selected, your display style and What’s New settings, how many archive pages are mapped, and the core library version – never their contents. Your genealogical data is never sent: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, and neither does the name of the tree you publish. The free plan answers a limited number of questions a month.
Tickets: with a licence or support token, only when you open the ticket form and click “Create ticket” does the plugin also send the conversation, the details above, the question category, the contact email you enter (pre-filled with your WordPress account email) and the first and last name from your WordPress profile; these are kept as a support ticket. On the free plan no ticket form is offered, so none of this is sent, and help from a person is on the WordPress.org support forum.
Retention: questions are not stored, and the conversation stays in your browser until you leave the page. Authorisation checks are cached for up to 12 hours; rate-limit and free-plan counters are kept against a hash of your host name (monthly counts for about 40 days); daily usage counters with no site identifier are kept for up to 180 days. Please do not paste details of living people into a question.
Terms: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/
Screenshots
Installation
- Install from Plugins > Add New and activate.
- Go to AP Family Archive and choose the tree to publish (or import a GEDCOM first from the Import/Export screen).
- Click “Make the pages for me”, then review and publish the draft pages.
FAQ
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Will living relatives appear on the site?
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No. Anyone flagged as living or private is never rendered to visitors; family listings show only a neutral “Living” placeholder. Enforced in the shared data core; cannot be disabled from the admin screen.
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Will it change or “clean up” my data?
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Never. Dates and places display exactly as recorded in your GEDCOM; standardised values are used only for sorting and search, stored separately from your original text.
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Is my family data stored on my own server?
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Yes. All genealogical data stays in your WordPress database – no record is ever transmitted anywhere. The two optional services that can receive limited non-genealogical information are itemised under External services below; neither is required.
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Can I export my data?
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Yes. Full GEDCOM export is included in the free version – take your complete data to any genealogy application at any time.
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Can I publish more than one tree?
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The free version publishes one tree at a time (changeable at any point); Pro publishes several trees together on one site.
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Does it work with AP Family Trees?
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Yes – they share one data core: import in either plugin and both publish the same people. Run Archive on its own or alongside Trees.
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Where do I get support?
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Use the support forum here on WordPress.org, or the in-plugin Help assistant: with an AI provider configured in WordPress it answers locally (no account or connection needed); the optional support service can also answer and reach human support.
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How do I upgrade from Free to Pro?
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Purchase a licence from the Upgrade tab, then download and install the Pro package (premium features are not contained in this free plugin); settings and all genealogical data are kept as the Pro build replaces the free one in place. This free plugin never downloads or installs the Pro package itself.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“AP Family Archive” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “AP Family Archive” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
Full history: see changelog.txt in the plugin folder.
1.0.2
- Fixed: importing a GEDCOM failed with “Sorry, you are not allowed to upload this file type” on servers running newer versions of PHP, whose file-type check labels GEDCOM files differently. GEDCOM files are now recognised by their contents.
- Fixed: names in a GEDCOM written as “Given /Surname/” with no separate given-name and surname lines – the way Family Tree Maker and several other programs export them – now import with the surname in the Surname field, instead of the whole name in First/given names and an empty surname index. Names recorded surname first, such as “/Kovacs/ Janos”, keep their given names. To correct a tree imported before this release, delete it and import the file again.
- Fixed: GEDCOM export left out every person marked private – all of them on a site where new imports are set to private. Private people are now included, marked as private in the file.
- Fixed: people who share a surname now always list in the same order, so paged people lists no longer skip or repeat anyone.
- Changed: the Help assistant’s privacy notice now states that if your own AI provider cannot answer and the site is connected to the support service, the question and recent chat history go to the service. The readme’s External services section describes what is sent in each case.
1.0.1
- Privacy: on a free site the support assistant no longer offers to raise a support ticket. It previously did, and creating one sent the conversation, the diagnostic snapshot, the contact email address you entered and your WordPress first and last name – which the support service then declined, because free-plugin support is handled on the WordPress.org forum. Nothing ticket-only now leaves a free site. A reply carrying no ticket number is no longer shown as a created ticket either.
- Security: the support assistant sends the conversation as separate form fields and sanitises each one as it is read, rather than decoding it from a single combined value; and each request proves its security token and your permission as two separate checks.
- Changed: the support assistant’s privacy notice and ticket form now state that the contact email address and your WordPress first and last name are sent with a ticket. Both were always sent; only the wording was incomplete, and the readme already said so.
- Import: a GEDCOM import that could not complete now says so, instead of reporting a clean finish; imported records honour the privacy settings you chose; and place and record-set handling is corrected.
- No change to your tree data, to how records display, or to what is stored.