Make a family tree on your phone

To make a family tree in Shijro, install it, add yourself, then add your parents and grandparents by name. The tree draws itself as you go. You can leave out dates, and you can invite relatives to fill in what you don’t know.

Why the tree starts with you

I didn’t want Shijro to open on an empty page and a form, which is where a lot of family trees end before they begin. So after you sign up it asks whether you’re starting your family’s tree or joining one a relative already started. Starting one is two short steps: you, then your parents and grandparents. Then you’re looking at your tree, with a photo, a memory, a question for a relative and inviting people offered as things to do next, not more steps in the way. Every step has a Later button.

A name is enough to add someone. A birthday can be a full date, a month and year, or just a year, because “she was born around 1931” is how most families actually know it.

How the tree is drawn

I wanted it to look like the tree you’d sketch on paper. Parents sit above their children. A couple is joined by a double line and sits closer together than brothers and sisters, so you can tell them apart. Brothers and sisters go from oldest to youngest.

Everyone gets a small card with their photo beside their full name and dates, low enough that four or five generations fit on a phone held upright. If there’s no photo yet, their initials sit in a circle of their own colour.

Your close family also carry a word saying what they are to you: father, grandmother, cousin, son-in-law, in your own language. I stopped at first cousins and in-laws, because past that the words get long and the person’s own page says it better. Tap anyone and the line from you to them lights up.

Zoom out and more relatives come into view, and zoom in to hide them again. In a big family, a cousin’s husband or wife shows as a small name on the cousin’s card, and tapping it brings them into the tree. Without that, a row of thirty cousins and their partners runs off any phone screen.

Adding people quickly

Tap anyone on the tree and their card shows four ways to grow it from them: a parent, a partner, a child or a brother or sister. Each opens the same short form, with two tabs at the top: a new person, or someone already in the family. If someone already has two parents, Parent is greyed out, so you can see at a glance what is missing.

Building it with your family

Nobody knows the whole family by themselves, so a Shijro tree is shared. You invite relatives with a link and decide who can edit and who can only look. Everyone sees the same tree as it grows.

To try it before adding your own family, the sign-in screen opens the Hartleys, a made-up family with four generations, photos and recordings.