Anceslio Family Tree & GEDCOM

Anceslio is a genealogy program that runs entirely on the device. It reads and writes GEDCOM files, draws a family tree and a descendant chart, and works out how two people are related. It needs no account and no internet connection.

WITH OR WITHOUT AN EXISTING FILE

A GEDCOM file is opened and written back out in the same format, GEDCOM 5.5.1 in UTF-8. Entries that Anceslio does not itself use are not lost along the way: they appear again in their place in the exported file.

If you have no file, you enter the family in the app. For each person you can add parents, partners and children. Naming somebody who does not exist yet creates that person as well.

Several families can sit side by side, each named, switched with one tap. For every file the app remembers a start person and opens there again.

FAMILY TREE TAB

One person stands at the centre, with parents, siblings, partners and children around them. Further generations of ancestors, further generations of descendants, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts can be switched on. Every group sits centred under the person it descends from.

Each person carries given name, surname, sex, date and place of birth and death, occupation and lineage or house; each marriage carries its date and place. Several marriages per person are provided for, and their order can be set.

You can search by name and year and filter by lineage and year of birth.

DESCENDANT CHART TAB

The chart in the form used by printed family books: the chosen person at the top, descendants below, black on white.

You can set how many generations are shown, the width of the boxes and the size of the text, whether only the first given name appears, and whether children are sorted by age. For a large chart the app starts with as many generations as stay readable on the screen; the complete chart is one tap away.

Per box you can hide branches, replace them with a reference ("see chart B"), and overwrite single lines of text by hand. A chart title can stand at the top right.

Output as PDF in A4 and A3, portrait or landscape, in A2 landscape, fitted automatically to the best page or at the exact size of the chart, and also as SVG and PNG. The settings of a chart can be saved as a project file and opened again.

KINSHIP TAB

Pick two people. The app gives the term, such as second cousin, great-great-grandfather, half-sister or great-aunt, together with the degree of kinship, the distance in generations, the common ancestor and the chain of descent between the two. Half blood is stated. An explanation of the terms stands beside it.

DATA

The app requests no permission at all. It has no server side, no advertising and no tracking. All data lives in the storage of the device. The GEDCOM export is the way out; files of that kind are read by Gramps, Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch among others.

CHECKING FOR DUPLICATES

A file that grew over the years often holds the same person more than once. The app compares every person with every other and lists who might be a double entry, showing what it went by. It compares names, dates, parents, spouse and children, and recognises spelling variants such as Müller and Mueller by sound.

Records are merged only when you confirm them, and nothing is lost: the surviving record takes everything from both. You only decide where the two contradict each other. The last ten steps can be undone, and the findings can be saved as a text file.

WHAT THE APP DOES NOT DO

It does not sync between devices and does not search online archives. It does not manage images, documents or source citations; whatever a GEDCOM file holds on those is kept on export but not displayed. Moving work between two devices goes through the GEDCOM file.

ALSO

A list of all people and families, with search and a branch filter, leads from any entry straight into the three tabs. Plus English and German, a light and a dark theme, full screen, a sample family, and a guide inside the app.