Keep the working half of your family history on your own WordPress site – private by definition, with every artefact, note and dead end in your own database rather than scattered across folders, inboxes and someone else’s platform.

AP Family Research is the workbench for the part of genealogy nobody sees: the certificates and screenshots you have not filed yet, the conjectures you are still testing, the searches that found nothing, and the reasoning that slowly turns a hunch into a proven fact. Capture anything in seconds, organise it around the questions you are actually trying to answer, and let the research log build itself as you work.

Nothing in this plugin is ever published. When a conclusion is finally solid, you promote it – deliberately – into your family tree with its sources and citations attached.

Built by AncestorPress – tools for family history, built to last.

Who It Is For

AP Family Research is designed for:

• Family historians with a backlog of photos, certificates, screenshots and notes that never quite got filed
• Researchers who work question-first – testing conjectures, chasing brick walls, and needing to remember what has already been tried
• One-name, one-place and society researchers handling material about many people at once
• Anyone who wants an exit – your research stays in your own database and exports in full, at any time
• Existing AP Family Trees users who want a private workspace that feeds their published tree

What Makes It Different

Most genealogy tools are built for the finished tree – the tidy, public result. AP Family Research is built for everything that comes before it: the mess, the uncertainty, and the evidence you are still weighing up.

It is private by definition. The plugin has no public output of any kind – no shortcodes, no pages, no front end. Nothing you capture is ever visible to your site’s visitors. The only way anything leaves is when you choose to promote a finished conclusion into your tree.

It works with zero discipline. Capture takes seconds and needs no metadata at all. The research log is written for you as a by-product of what you do, so you get the benefit of a methodical record without having to be methodical.

Dead ends are first-class. A search that found nothing is recorded as a real result – because knowing you already looked there is exactly what saves you repeating it in five years’ time.

And you can always walk away. Export the lot – every table as CSV, every original file, a readable dossier for each research question, and a plain-English note for whoever inherits your research.

Third-party libraries

This plugin bundles the following open-source libraries. All are GPL-compatible.

• php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson – MIT licence. Bundled with the shared AncestorPress Core Library for reading and writing GEDCOM data.
• Freemius WordPress SDK by Freemius – MIT licence. Used for licence management on the Pro plan.

Privacy and data

This plugin has no public front end and does not collect or transmit any personal data from your site or your visitors. Every artefact, transcription, question, note and log entry is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database.

The AI features are optional, and they run on your own connector. If you use them, they call the AI provider you have configured in WordPress yourself. AncestorPress operates no AI proxy and sells no AI credits – your research is never routed through us.

Living people are protected. Nothing concerning a living person is sent to an AI service without your explicit, per-operation consent, and every AI operation is written into your research log with the model used. Natural-language search sends only your search query – never your records.

If you activate a paid Pro licence, the Freemius SDK is used to validate and manage that licence. Freemius may collect basic site and usage data as part of licence activation. This is subject to the Freemius Privacy Policy. No licence activation is required to use the free plan.