Help & Guide

Grafted Trees™ is a collection of family trees you can browse, search, and turn into printable charts. This page covers how to find people, read a tree, make charts, and what signing in adds.

Finding people & trees

• Search. Use the Given and Surname boxes at the top of any page. The full search page also lets you match by sound (Soundex), narrow by birth or death year (with a ± range), by place, or by a source reference, and limit the search to a single tree.
• Browse all trees. From Browse → See all trees you get every tree in the database, grouped by surname and showing where each one is rooted. Click any tree to open it.

Reading a tree

Each tree is centered on a root couple; everyone else is shown by their relationship to that couple. A person page is the complete record for one individual — names (including Chinese names where we have them), dates, parents, spouse(s), children, notes, sources, and any photographs. Follow the links to relatives to walk the whole tree one person at a time.

Charts

From a person you can build printable charts and download them as PDFs:

• Pedigree / ancestor — ancestors across several generations.
• Fan — a radial view of the ancestry.
• Descendant — everyone descended from a chosen person.
• Jiapu (家譜) — a traditional Chinese lineage-book layout, for the trees that carry Chinese names.

Pick a paper size and a background (plain, parchment, or rice paper), then download. Charts are free to make; the free version carries a small watermark. Members remove it, and the owner of a tree always gets clean charts of their own tree.

Signing in

Sign in with Google or Apple from the top-right. An account lets you keep favorites, see your recently visited people and trees, and leave comments on a person. We store only the name, email, and ID your provider gives us — never a password. See the Privacy page for details.

Living people & privacy

We protect living individuals without erasing them from the family. For anyone who is (or may still be) living, the public view is obfuscated rather than removed: the surname stays, the given name is shortened to an initial, and birth/death dates, events, and photos are withheld. The person still appears in their proper place in the tree, so the shape of the family is preserved — you simply won’t see a living person’s particulars.

This applies everywhere the data shows up — person pages, charts, and GEDCOM downloads alike. The full, unobfuscated detail (and the pristine original GEDCOM) is reserved for the owner of that tree and for Premier members; the original “as-is” GEDCOM is never filtered, so it is simply not offered to anyone else.

Private trees

Obfuscation hides the details of living people; a private tree is the bigger hammer — the whole tree is hidden, visible only to its owner and to site administrators, and absent from search and the all-trees list for everyone else.

Membership (preview — not final)

Browsing, searching, and reading the trees is free, and always will be. A membership is optional and helps cover the cost of running the site. Here is the shape of what we are planning — the exact tiers and prices are not settled yet:

• Free — browse, search, read every public tree, and make charts (watermarked).
• Member — a small weekly, monthly, or yearly amount removes the chart watermark and opens the richer views.
• Your own trees — when tree upload arrives, owning your family tree will let you make clean charts of it and, if you wish, keep it private.
• Whole site — a single higher tier (or enough individual trees) opens everything.

This is a preview of where we are headed, not a price list.

Questions

Email admin@swales.us.