A private family tree app

Shijro is a private family tree app. Only the relatives you invite can see your family, and nobody else can find it. It’s free to use, with no advertisements, and your family’s data is never sold. Anyone in the family can download everything at any time.

Why I made every family private

Family history is personal. It includes living children, addresses, illnesses, divorces and old photos that someone might not want strangers to see. So there is no public profile in Shijro, no search that finds your relatives, and no setting that opens your tree to everyone. The only public family is the Hartleys, a made-up family for trying the app.

You decide who joins, and whether each relative can help build the tree or only look at it.

What’s free

Building the tree, adding photos, documents, stories and recordings, and inviting relatives are all free. Each family has room for 2,000 people and 100 MB of photos, documents and recordings. A family that needs more can add storage, and can buy more AI time for writing out and translating recordings. Those are the only things Shijro sells.

Download everything

I didn’t want your family’s history to depend on my app still existing. So anyone in a family can download all of it from the family’s Settings: the tree, a page for each person, stories, photos, recordings with their words, and documents. It opens in any web browser, with no app and no internet connection.

Undoing mistakes

Anything deleted stays in Recently deleted for 30 days and can be restored from there. A whole family that was deleted can be brought back for 30 days too, and everyone who was in it gets an email saying so.

How Shijro differs from Ancestry and MyHeritage

Shijro isn’t a DNA service or a database of public records, and it doesn’t match you with strangers. It holds only what your own family knows: names, dates, photos, and stories in their own voices.