Overview

For genealogists

Gigatrees has been under continuous development for over 20 years and available for most of that time as a free download. It was designed by and for genealogists to supplement existing genealogy tools, not to replace them. It will not modify your existing database nor does it require any changes to your GEDCOM file. It is entirely driven by external configuration text files. Also, it is compatible with virtually any GEDCOM file, exported from any application. With it, you can build specific reports or an entire family tree for viewing at home on your computer, for sending to your cousin Dave, or for publishing online to share with the world. You can even password protect your published tree, so that only people you know can access it. It does not require any special skills. No programming or HTML knowledge is needed, though understanding a few basic HTML tags would definitely be a plus. I’ve tried to make using the application as easy as possible, but as it is an extremely powerful and versatile application, there are a great number of configurable parameters thay may be considered. Most of these, however, are optional, so you can decide when, or if, you want to delve deeper.

For everyone else

Gigatrees was designed primarily for genealogists, but it can also be used by everyone for creating beautiful blogs and photo galleries. It can even be used to create static web pages with custom menus, for building a wide variety of other types of websites as well.

The details

Gigatrees is a Microsoft Windows x64 console application designed for creating websites. It has built-in support for static pages, blogging, photo galleries and for genealogists, an enhanced family tree. Any combination of these four functions can be seemlessly integrated into your website. Gigatrees supports most file encodings, character sets and language translations, so can be used by virtually everyone, worldwide. It uses current web technologies to ensure websites are compatable with all brands of web browsers and mobile devices. Gigatrees can save your web pages in HTML, or into a database of online hosting. Gigatrees also supports automatic linking of URLs and allows embedding HTML into almost any data field. Gigatrees is packed full of features and best of all, it is completely free.

For building family trees, Gigatrees supports importing all versions of GEDCOM 5 files including many application specific extensions. GEDCOM files can be exported from all modern genealogy editing applications including Ancestry.com. Other features include hiding private data on public trees, analyzing DNA matches and autogenerating DNA ancestor charts, creating compact census tables, calculating consanguinity between spouses and ethnicities based on a person's origins, and has advanced date handling allowing it to recognize most unambiguous date formats including built-in support for British monarch dates. Gigatrees also does in-depth consistency checking, by comparing event dates between related individuals and flagging those that are either impossible or improbable.

To get started all that is required is that you set the path to your GEDCOM file (for genealogist's only) and set your website's title. Beyond that, Gigatrees supports hundreds of additional configuration options that can be added for fine-tuning and tailoring your family tree or website. It is entirely up to you how many or few of these you use. The remaining documentation discusses each of these options in turn. For now though you can read through the short Quick Start Guide.