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Privacy and the demo families

A family-history file holds personal data about living people. The orchard is built so that a published family never shows them.

The families on the public site

The public site shows three families, each built from a GEDCOM file in GenealogyKG's curated corpus of trees already published elsewhere:

Family Slug Home person
George Washington's Family washington George Washington
The Kennedys kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The Tudors tudors Henry Tudor

The start screen's Family menu lists them in this order, and the orchard opens on the first unless you have picked another on this device or the address names one with ?family=. Each is built with GenealogyKG's living-person filter on, at a cutoff of 100 years:

  • Anyone with no death or burial record who was born within the last 100 years is treated as living.
  • For the Kennedys, someone with neither a birth date nor a death record is treated as living too.
  • The Tudors and George Washington's family are wholly historical files, so there a missing birth date is taken as an old record, not a living person.

The filter and its options are documented under Living-person privacy on the GenealogyKG site.

What "Living" means in the orchard

A person the filter withholds keeps their place in the family, so the trees still run through them, and nothing else:

  • Their name is "Living", with no dates, places or events.
  • Their page in the record reader reads "Living. Details are withheld for people who may be alive." It has no record lines and no Make this the home tree button.
  • In schematic mode their bead is gray, and they get no name plate.
  • The search field does not match them.
  • The orchard never picks a living person as the home tree on its own.

The redaction happens before the orchard sees the data. genkg export-web refuses a store built without the filter, and after writing an export it scans the files for every withheld name. The web tests check that every committed test fixture was exported with the filter on and that each living person in it has no dates, places or page.

What stays in your browser

The orchard has no accounts and sends nothing about you anywhere. It fetches the page and the family's files, and keeps the rest in this browser's storage:

  • your settings, shared by every family;
  • for each family, your album, the groves you have visited and the home person you chose;
  • the family you picked last;
  • whether you have heard the tour's full welcome;
  • your location, if you allowed it, rounded to 0.1 degree and used only to place the sky.

Clearing the site's data in the browser removes all of it.

Showing your own family

You can run the orchard on your own family, on your own machine. Real family data is never committed to the repository or published from it.

  1. Build a GenealogyKG store from your GEDCOM file with the living filter on. See Building a store and Living-person privacy.
  2. Export it for the orchard with genkg export-web. See Exports for The Knowledge Press: The Family.
  3. In a checkout of kpress_family, make family runs the export into web/public/families/<slug>/ and adds it to the start screen's list, and make web-dev serves the orchard at http://localhost:5173:
make web-install
make family FAMILY=mine FAMILY_REPO=../my-family FAMILY_TITLE="My Family"
make web-dev

The dev server also listens on your network address, so a phone or iPad on the same network can open http://<your-mac>.local:5173. Vite refuses host names it does not know, so name yours when you start the server, which keeps it out of vite.config.ts and the repository:

__VITE_ADDITIONAL_SERVER_ALLOWED_HOSTS=<your-mac>.local make web-dev

FAMILY_FOCAL=<id> names the person the home tree opens on. The README covers the other options. web/public/families/ is ignored by git, so the export stays on your machine.