Genealogy & Family

Why Self-Host Your Genealogy Research?

Ancestry.com charges $25-50/month for access to records and stores your family tree, DNA connections, and personal family history on their servers. FamilySearch is free but operated by the LDS Church and retains your data indefinitely. Both platforms have access to your family relationships, birth dates, death records, and in Ancestry’s case, genetic information — a uniquely sensitive dataset that reveals not just your own identity but the identities and relationships of every family member you document, including those who never consented to being in a database.

Self-hosted genealogy platforms let you build and maintain your family tree on your own infrastructure. Gramps is a mature, full-featured genealogy application with a web interface (Gramps Web) that supports GEDCOM import/export, relationship charts, maps, timelines, and detailed source citations. Webtrees is a web-based genealogy application that handles multi-user collaboration, privacy controls for living individuals, and extensive reporting — a direct replacement for the family tree features of Ancestry without the subscription cost. Monica provides a personal CRM that extends beyond genealogy into relationship management, tracking interactions and important dates for your broader social network.

The privacy argument for self-hosted genealogy is uniquely strong. Family tree data is multigenerational — it contains information about children, deceased relatives, and extended family members who cannot consent to having their data on a commercial platform. DNA connections and health history patterns are increasingly valuable to insurance companies and law enforcement, creating risks that extend beyond the person who uploaded the data. Relaticle provides a modern interface for family relationship management. Keeping this data on your own server ensures that your family history remains private and is shared only with family members you explicitly grant access to.