Overview

Gigatrees is a completely free family tree website generator designed to supplement existing genealogy tools. It will not modify your existing database nor does it require any changes to your GEDCOM file. It is entirely driven by external configuration files. It is compatible with virtually any GEDCOM file exported from any application including Ancestry.com. It 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 give permission, can access it. It does not require any special skills; no programming or HTML knowledge is needed.

Gigatrees is a Microsoft Windows x64 console application (it can also run on a Mac in a BootCamp partition). It has built-in support for static pages, blogging, photo galleries and for genealogists, a family tree. Any combination of these four features 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 also supports automatic linking of URLs and allows embedding HTML into almost any data field.

For building family trees, Gigatrees supports importing all versions of GEDCOM files from 5.0 to 7.0+, 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, calculating ethnicities based on a person's ancestor'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 data validation by comparing event dates between related individuals and flagging those that are inconsistent.

To get started all that is required is that you set the path to your GEDCOM file and set your website's title (in user.xml). Beyond that, Gigatrees supports many additional configuration options that can be included 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.