About Tree Together

My daughter asks a lot of questions about our family. Who were her great-grandparents? Where did they live? What were they like? Who does she take after?

They are good questions, and I didn’t always have good answers. Most of our family lives in a different country from us, so she doesn’t grow up with the things that usually carry a family’s story from one generation to the next: Sunday lunches with grandparents, aunts telling the same stories every year, cousins pointing at old photos and saying “that’s your great-uncle.”

My own grandparents are no longer alive. What I know about them, and about the generations before them, is spread across relatives in different places and time zones. Each person holds a few pieces. Nobody holds the whole picture.

I’m a software developer, so I did what developers do: I built a tool. Tree Together is a family tree that a whole family can build at the same time, from wherever they live.

Instead of one person trying to research everything, everyone adds what they know. An aunt adds her parents’ names. A cousin adds the year someone was born. A grandparent’s sibling adds the story of how the family came to live where it does. Bit by bit the gaps fill in, and the tree becomes something none of us could have made alone.

For my daughter, it means that when she asks “who’s this?”, there is somewhere to look, and the answer comes from the people who actually knew them.

• Families spread across cities, countries and time zones.
• Parents who want their children to know where they come from.
• Anyone who has realised that the people who remember the old stories won’t always be around to tell them.

You don’t need to be a genealogist, and you don’t need records or research. You only need the people in your family and what they remember.

You create a tree and share its join code with relatives. Everyone who joins can add people, connect them as parents, partners and children, and write down birth years and notes. Changes appear for everyone straight away, and each person can arrange the tree on screen in the way that makes sense to them. The help guide walks through every step.

Family trees aren’t public. Only people who join with your tree’s code can see it, and the owner can change the code at any time. Tree Together is free to use. Read the privacy policy for the details.

Tree Together is made by Silent Monkey, an independent developer based in New Zealand. It’s a small project built by one person, so feedback really does shape what gets built next. If you have an idea, find a bug, or just want to share how your family is using it, email admin@silentmonkey.co.nz.