Rootward: Private Family Tree

Rootward keeps your family tree on your phone. Type in your relatives from the papers you have, or open a GEDCOM file from another genealogy program, then see the family, the charts and how any two people are related, with no account and no cloud.

★ PEOPLE AND FAMILIES, AS THE OLD PAPERS GIVE THEM
- Given names, surname, birth surname and suffix; a birth, a death and a burial, each with a date and a place; your notes
- A family has up to two partners, whatever their sex, with a marriage, a partnership or a divorce, and its children
- Each child is a birth, adopted, foster or step child of that family
- Dates as genealogy writes them: about 1850, before 1900, between 1840 and 1845, 10 February 1699/00, the Julian calendar, or a phrase of your own
- Nobody can become their own ancestor: a link that would make one is refused, and the app says why

★ SEE THE FAMILY
- A family view: one person with their parents above, partners beside and children below; tap anyone to move to them
- A pedigree chart and a descendants chart, 3 to 6 generations, with pinch, pan and zoom
- Every person's page lists their parents, partners, children, brothers and sisters, so the chart is never the only way to anyone
- Search by the beginning of any given name or surname, accents ignored, or browse every surname with its count

★ HOW ARE THESE TWO RELATED?
Pick two people and Rootward names the relationship in plain words, from parent to tenth cousin three times removed, with half relations, adoptions, in-laws and step relations, and shows their common ancestors and the line between the two. It is worked out from what you entered, in this tree.

★ GEDCOM 5.5.1 IN AND OUT, SO YOUR TREE IS NEVER LOCKED IN
- Open a GEDCOM file saved by a desktop program or a genealogy website: GEDCOM 5.5.1 and 5.5 in UTF-8, UTF-16 or ANSEL, and the people, families and notes of a GEDCOM 7 file
- An import always makes a new tree and never replaces one, and says in numbers what it kept, what it changed and what it left out
- Save any tree as a GEDCOM 5.5.1 file, wherever you choose, for any genealogy program to open
- Leave out the details of the living when you share a tree: their names become Living, and their dates, places and notes stay out of the file
- Keep several trees: yours, a partner's, a cousin's file

★ YOUR TREE STAYS ON YOUR PHONE
Your trees, the people in them and what you write about them stay on your phone. They leave it only if you save a tree as a GEDCOM file where you choose, and a GEDCOM file is plain text: it is not encrypted.
- Rootward needs no account and no connection to keep a tree, and uses the internet only to show ads
- It never asks you for a permission: not your contacts, not your files, not notifications
- Android's cloud backup is off for Rootward, so a new phone starts with no trees until you open a GEDCOM file you saved
- Rootward keeps the tree you build and searches nothing outside it

★ ADS
The ads are shown by Google's ads software, and it receives what the ads of any app receive: your phone's advertising ID, an approximate location from its internet address, and how the ads are seen. Rootward never gives it a name, a place, a date or a note from your trees. An ad only ever comes after you add a new person, never while you type, and never two within half an hour. One video, watched from Settings, turns the ads off for a day; no part of Rootward waits behind it.

Privacy policy: https://dash-fusion.github.io/privacy/list-familytree

Recent changes:
The first release of Rootward. Keep your family tree on your phone: people and families with dates as genealogy writes them, a family view, pedigree and descendants charts, and how any two people are related. Open and save GEDCOM 5.5.1 files, and leave out the details of the living when you share a tree. No account and no cloud: your trees stay on your phone.