Lifelines: Family Tree Viewer

Lifelines: A GEDCOM viewer Overview Lifelines allows you to explore your family history offline using a unique life-spanning timeline set against real historical events, as well as more traditional tree views which you can carry around on your iPad. All the richness of your GEDCOM research is available to see and is enhanced with descriptions of what life was like for ordinary people during the times they lived in. As well as this you get a traditional four generation hourglass chart, a tree explorer which allows you to expand the generations backwards and forwards, a ‘route map’ which allows you to easily see how two people are related and a plausibility checker. All the views can be exported for printing or as PDFs, ready to share or keep on file. Lifelines is a visualiser, not an editor. You just load up a standard GEDCOM file output from your family history research tool, with media for richness if your family history program allows it, and off you go. There are no accounts, no sign-ups, and nothing is sent anywhere — everything happens locally on your iPad. Lifelines needs a GEDCOM file to do anything. On first launch, use Open GEDCOM File to choose a .ged file exported from your genealogy software (GEDCOM 5.5 and 7.0 are both supported). Until a file is loaded, there's nothing to explore — Lifelines isn't a place to start your family history, it's a place to bring it once it exists. The views Timeline. See a person's whole life as a single bar stretching across the years, alongside every close relative's bar on the same axis — so you can see at a glance who overlapped with whom, and for how long. Layer in major historical events from the UK, the US, Europe, or the wider world to place a life in its moment, right down to a snapshot of what the decade looked like around them. Detail. Tap on the focus person to see the detail of what’s on the GEDCOM for them. Include the detailed source notes if you wish. Enhance with a description of each decade in which they lived, and switch on detailed events for a deeper view of what happened during that decade, from a UK, US, European or Worldwide perspective. Hourglass. The classic genealogy chart, done cleanly: your focus person sits at the centre, with ancestors fanning out to the left and descendants to the right, spouses shown alongside. Again tap the focus person to see their Detail panel. Explorer. Start from the same four-generation view as Hourglass, then go further — tap a chevron to pull back another generation on just the branch you're curious about, as deep as ten generations, without losing your place in the rest of the tree. Pinch to zoom, tap anyone to make them the new focus, and collapse a branch back down just as easily as you opened it. Route. Pick any two people in the file and see exactly how they're connected — the full chain of relationships laid out step by step, so "how are we related?" always has a clear answer. Check. A built-in plausibility pass over your whole file, flagging things worth a second look: dates out of order, ages that don't add up, marriages or births that don't quite fit the timeline. Issues are grouped by how serious they look, and thresholds are set with real historical context in mind — a 12-year-old bride or a second marriage with no previously recorded divorce isn't automatically flagged as wrong, because for much of history it wasn't. Index. Every person in the file, alphabetically, with instant search — the fastest way to jump straight to someone when you already know who you're looking for.