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

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/