A family tree holds a lot of stories, and a map of pins does not tell any of them. Story mode is the first try at fixing that.
What it does
Pick a person. The map flies back to the oldest marriage in their ancestry and works forward, one couple at a time, down to the person you chose. Each marriage is a chapter with up to four parts:
- The wedding. Who married whom, where, how old they were, and how far each of them had come to get there.
- Their life. Where they settled, moves the record shows, their work, war service, how many children they had.
- The end. Who died first, where, at what age, and how long the other lived on.
- The bridge. The child who carries the line to the next chapter.
A caption card at the bottom of the map reads each part. The pins for that chapter drop onto the map, and an arc joins the two birthplaces when a couple came from different places. A small fan chart in the corner shows which line is being told and which lines are still to come. You can click any part of the fan to jump to that chapter, skip a chapter, or stop at any time.
At the end, the map is handed back to you with all the pins on it.
Where the words come from
Every sentence is built from facts in your file. Nothing is invented. If a record has no marriage place, the caption says so. If a distance is given, it is the straight line between two recorded places, always with "about" in front of it. A thin record makes a shorter chapter, never a padded one.
The story stops before it reaches anyone who might still be living. On a public share with living people hidden, their records are removed on the server before the story is built, so a shared link cannot narrate them.
Read aloud
There is a speaker button on the caption card. The narration is a voice that runs on our own server, so the text of your family story is never sent to a third party. It is optional and remembered per browser.
Beta
Story mode is new. The wording is rough in places and the pacing is not always right. It is marked beta. If a caption says something odd about your family, the fix is usually in the record. Tell us anyway.
Try it
Load the example family and press Play a story at the bottom of the map. The example is fictional, so nothing in it is anyone's private history. Then try your own file.