Work / Product · Web, mobile, desktop
FamilyTree App
A family history that families and heritage societies build together.
A family-tree and heritage platform that helps people of Nordic descent trace, document and share their family history. Heritage associations get dedicated society workspaces for their members and archives.
- Status
- Pre-handover
- What it is
- Family trees, person profiles and a secure document vault, plus society workspaces with curated archives.
- Who it's for
- Families of Nordic descent, and heritage associations that offer it to their members (B2B2C).
- My role
- Founder. Product strategy, IP and trademarks, grant funding and go-to-market; hands-on technical lead.
The problem
Family history is scattered across documents, photo libraries, GEDCOM files and cloud accounts, often in several languages. Heritage associations want shared archives without losing control of who sees what.
Constraints
- Sensitive personal data, including living relatives, under GDPR
- Families and societies share one platform with different permissions
- Six interface languages: EN, DE, FI, SV, NO, DA
- Strong identification through Nordic eID
What I did
I lead the company side, from strategy and trademarks to funding and go-to-market, and lead the technical work, directing and reviewing AI-assisted development across web, mobile and desktop.
Main journey
- Person
Bring records in
Import a GEDCOM 7.0 file, or use the desktop helper to gather files from Google Takeout, OneDrive and Dropbox.
- Code
Store as a graph
People and relationships become nodes and edges, so kinship can be queried directly.
- Person
Explore the tree
Navigate the interactive canvas and follow kinship paths between relatives.
- Code
Protect the vault
Documents and photos are encrypted at rest and shared with family-aware permissions.
- Person
Contribute to a society
Members add to a curated archive, and reviewers approve items through an archival-review workflow.
Decisions and tradeoffs
Graph-native data model
Relationships are the core of the product, so they live in Neo4j instead of being rebuilt from tables.
Tradeoff: A smaller tooling ecosystem than a relational database.
One platform, policy-guarded
Personal and society use share one platform. Every society read and write goes through organisation-scoped queries and a central policy guard.
Tradeoff: Every new feature must pass through the guard, which slows quick additions.
Separate vault keys
Files are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, with separate keys for personal and society vaults.
Tradeoff: More key management, in exchange for a clear boundary between family and society data.
No generated relationships
In genealogy a confident wrong answer is worse than none. The tree comes from explicit input, imports and review.
Tradeoff: Slower tree building than tools that guess relatives.
Evidence
- GDPR Article 15 data export built in
- Tamper-evident audit log retained for seven years
- Trade name registered with the Finnish Patent and Registration Office; EU trademark application filed
No user numbers or security assessment results are published.
Status and limitations
- Pre-handover: Web platform, not yet handed over
- Not yet released: Mobile app (React Native / Expo), not yet published in app stores
- Planned: Branded society portals with society logos and colours
- Not built: DNA features, OCR and face clustering
Stack
Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, React Flow, React Native / Expo, Electron, Neo4j, Cloudflare R2, Inngest, Stripe, Resend, Sentry, Vercel, Signicat (Nordic eID)
Technical detail
Modules
- Interactive family-tree canvas with kinship-path navigation
- Person profiles
- Secure vault for family documents and photos, with family-aware sharing
- Society workspaces: curated archive, collections, community wall, archival review
- GEDCOM 7.0 import and a desktop import helper
- Subscription billing
Privacy and security
- GDPR by design
- AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, separate personal and society vault keys
- Multi-axis privacy guard in front of all family-graph reads
- Tamper-evident audit log kept for seven years