Family tree website with a page for every ancestor

What a family history site is for

Most family trees live inside a research platform, where only members can see them and the stories are buried under record hints. A family tree website of your own does different jobs: it presents the finished research in a readable form, gives relatives a link they can open without an account, and outlasts any one subscription. Distant relatives searching for an ancestor's name sometimes find these sites and get in touch.

A page for each person

Keep people in a CMS collection, one entry per person, with typed fields edited in the dashboard. Each person gets a page of their own at /<collection>/<slug>, and the collection page lists everyone. Decide the fields before you start; consistency across a few hundred entries matters more than any one page.

Name: Full name at birth, with married names and spelling variants noted.
Dates and places: Birth, marriage and death, each with the place as it was named at the time.
Parents, spouse, children: Names, with links to their own pages.
Life story: Occupation, where they lived, what you know from letters or family memory.
Sources: Each fact's evidence: the census year and piece number, the register entry, the certificate.
Confidence: Proven, probable or family story, so readers know what to trust.

Citing sources is what separates family history from family legend. A reader who finds a cousin's page should be able to check every date, and your future self will thank you for it.

An interactive tree, built as an app

Plain pages are good for reading but poor at showing how everyone connects. For that, an Anticode app build works: the model writes an interactive tree as one HTML document you can pan, zoom and click through. Apps can read the project's CMS collections as read-only content, so the tree can draw from the same people you've entered as pages.

It runs in a sandbox with no network, so it shows only what's in your project; it can't look up records anywhere.
Relatives can't edit it. Changes go through you, in the dashboard.
Big trees need care. Ask for one branch or a few generations per view, and test it on a phone before sharing.
Data typed in the app stays in that visitor's browser and isn't shared with anyone.

Protect living relatives

A published Anticode site is public, has no password-protected pages, and serves a sitemap so search engines can find it. Genealogy societies commonly advise against publishing details of living people, and in many countries names, birth dates and family links of living people are personal data. Practical rules:

Show living people as "Living" with no dates or places, or leave them out entirely.
Never publish mothers' maiden names or full birth dates of anyone alive; they're used as security answers.
Ask before writing about sensitive history, such as adoptions, illegitimacy, illness or crimes, involving people whose children are alive.
Check image rights for photos of documents from archives; some allow personal use only.

Building it

Describe the project: "a family history website for the Hartley family of Lancashire, from 1780 to 1950, with a page per person, sources, and an interactive family tree". The Architect shows the plan before building; set up the people collection, enter a dozen people, then build the tree app once the fields have settled. Upload old photographs and document scans to the build and write alt text that says who's in them and when. Editorial (Geist) or Organic (Figtree) design systems suit most genealogy websites.

What it doesn't do

No genealogy database. There's no GEDCOM import or export, and no relationship calculations beyond what you enter.
No record matching or hints from archives or other trees.
No shared editing by relatives. They can send corrections through the contact form.
No private branches. Everything published is public.

Questions people ask

Can relatives send me photos for the site?

Not through a form; forms don't take file uploads. Ask them to email photos, then add them to the build yourself.

Should I keep my research platform subscription?

Keep your research in the tool built for it. The website is for presenting finished research, and you update it when the research changes.

Will the site show up when people search for an ancestor?

Each published site serves its own sitemap and robots.txt for search engines. Whether a page appears for a name depends on the search engine, but a page per person with real detail gives it the best chance.