AP Family Archive

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

Part of the AncestorPress suite

Shares its data core with AP Family Trees – install either first, alone or together; the same people appear in both with no re-import.

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 (optional support assistant)

The Help button on the plugin’s admin screens opens a support assistant. Nothing is sent until you open it and accept the privacy notice inside it.

With an AI provider set in WordPress, questions are answered locally on that provider: your question and chat history stay on your site; the assistant only fetches product documentation from the AncestorPress Support Service at bwtlsupport.com (operated by Black and White Trading Ltd), sending your site address and plugin version. No account, token or licence is needed for local answering.

When the support service answers instead (no local AI provider, or you connected the service), it also receives your question and recent chat history, your site address and – where available – its licence installation identifier (for authorising that service and fair-use limits), installed AncestorPress plugin versions, the admin screen identifier, and a short whitelist of non-sensitive settings, kept only as aggregated statistics. Ordinary questions are processed transiently, not retained.

Your genealogical data is never sent on either path: no person, family, event, source or media record leaves your site, nor the name of the tree you publish. Passwords and API keys are never collected; the assistant is read-only.

Escalation: only “Send to support” transmits and retains the transcript, diagnostics and the contact email you supply, so a support agent can reply.

Terms of service: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy policy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/