Family Archive and History: life stories and old photos

Family Archive and History is an optional module switched on from the add-ons (Add-ons). It gives each person a story and the whole family a book.

A person's story

1. Open Family History, choose the person (your grandfather, say) and press Open the story.
2. Press Add a milestone: the year, a title such as "He opened his shop", the story, and up to 10 old photos with a caption for each.
3. Milestones sit on a timeline ordered by year, and each one can get likes and comments from your relatives.

Who writes?

• The person (while alive), the creator and the admins write directly, and they are the ones who write about someone who has passed.
• Other relatives suggest a memory; it shows after the owner or an admin approves it, so nobody spoils the history. The one who suggested can withdraw it.

The family timeline

The module's main page opens on one timeline for the whole family, by year: the written milestones with their photos and recordings, together with what the tree already knows: births, marriages and deaths. The decade bar at the top jumps to the 1950s, 1960s and so on, and you can filter by person or kind. (A birth shows according to its owner's privacy.)

The family book

The Book tab gathers every approved milestone into decades (the 1940s, 1950s…) with a cover photo for each. The book is read-only, with no likes or comments.

Events of the whole family

Not every event belongs to one person: "The family moved to Cairo" or "The big reunion". In the Family events tab the creator and admins add an event directly, other members suggest one that shows after approval; it appears on the timeline and in the book, and has photos, likes and comments.

The family book to print or keep

From the Book tab anyone in the family can make the family's book: a cover, a contents page by decade, each decade's stories with their photos, and an index of the names of everyone in the family at the end (you can turn it off). Choose particular people if you want a book about one branch or person, or leave it for everyone. Then Print / save as PDF or Download the e-book file, which has the pictures inside (the first 60) to keep, send or read offline.

Sharing and printing

• Print gives a clean page of the story to save as PDF or print.
• A share link made by the story's owner or an admin lets people outside the tree read it without signing in. Only approved milestones show, without comments, search engines do not index it, and you can stop sharing so the old link stops working.

Your photos stay private and are shrunk automatically. Every addition, change and deletion is recorded in Family activity.