Leave the cloud
Your family isn't a product
Cloud family tree sites can raise prices, change their terms, get bought, or shut down. For many of them, your family's data is the business. With Kith, nobody gets your data unless you give it to them.
A cloud family tree site
- A subscription that never ends, and goes up
- Your relatives' details on someone else's servers
- Terms that change, and owners that change
- Ads, tracking and upsells
- Stop paying and lose the records and tools your work depends on
Kith
- Free and open source, with no account to pay for
- Runs on your own server, at home or anywhere you choose
- You decide who gets in, and what they can see
- No ads, no trackers, no analytics. The only outside service is OpenStreetMap, for maps
- Export a GEDCOM file any time. The code is yours to keep, too
Why Kith
Made for the whole family, not just the researcher
Most genealogy software is built for the one person doing the research. Kith is built for everyone that person wants to share it with.
Private by default
Living people are hidden from anyone who isn't allowed to see them. Relatives ask for an account, you say yes, and they can mark "this is me".
Easy for everyone
Clear pages that work on phones. Five themes, including dark and large print. A weekly email of what's new keeps the family coming back.
Serious about sources
Citations with scans of the record, census transcriptions matched to people, and data checks that catch impossible dates before your cousins do.
Charts
See the family at a glance
Every chart is a click from any person, and every box links to that person's page.
- Hourglass: parents above, children below, grouped by marriage
- Ancestors, descendants, and a fan chart with photos
- Print the fan chart as a poster for the next reunion
- How any two people are related, as a row of faces
Research
The census, sorted out for you
Browse any census year by place and household. Kith reads the names typed into your census transcriptions and suggests who each one is. You say yes, and it can fill in a birth year from the age.
- Places drill down from state to county to town
- A map of where each life happened, in the order it happened
- One-click searches on FamilySearch, Find a Grave, Ancestry and old newspapers
Looks
Light, dark, or large print
Each person picks the theme they like. Grandma gets large print, the night owls get dark, and nobody has to change a setting for anyone else.
And the rest
Everything a family site needs
Person and family pagesEvents, sources, notes, a life story, and married names.
Photos and documentsTag faces to people, comment, and preview PDFs.
Edit on the siteAdd relatives, merge duplicates, and tidy place names.
Search that forgivesBy name, married name, spelling variant, family or place.
Branch books and mapsPrint a branch's life stories. Map where a surname lived.
GEDCOM import and exportBring your tree from other software, with undo.
What's newWatch a person, and get an optional weekly email.
Simple to runNightly backups, restore from the admin page, upgrades on restart.
Where the lines beginThe earliest known person of each surname.
Install
Up and running in minutes
On a Proxmox VE host, one command builds a container with Kith, its database and your first admin account.
$ bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dreed47/kith/main/ct/kith.sh)"
# Then your admin login is in the container: cat ~/kith.credsWho's behind it
Kith is built by a veteran, retired IT professional, and it runs that family's own site every day. It's written with AI (Anthropic's Claude). A person decides what gets built, and reviews and tests every change.
It's a "here's the code" project: pull requests are welcome, but there are no support promises.