Dankstory

Family trees for fiction

Family tree maker for your fictional family

House colours and crests, titles, second marriages, adoptions and unknown parents. Free, no sign-up, saved in this browser.

Start your family's tree, or look around a finished one first.

The whole tree is fitted to one page, with its name as the title. Large trees print small; the SVG keeps every detail.

Houses

A house gives its members' boxes one colour and a crest beside their names. Choose each person's house, and the house they were born into, in their edit sheet.

Check dates and loops

Reads the year number in each Born and Died box. Tap a line to go to that person. Checking never changes your tree.

    Your tree is kept in this browser only. Clearing site data deletes it; save a file to keep it or move it to another device.

    What this is

    A family tree editor for invented families: fantasy houses, royal lines, sci-fi clans, your original characters. Each person has a name, a title, a house, free-text birth and death dates (so "Year 312 of the Third Age" or "the winter the river froze" both work) and notes. People can have several partners in order, each married, partners or separated; a child can be born to, adopted by or fostered by their parents, or have an unknown other parent. The chart lays itself out, one generation per row.

    Houses give their members' boxes one colour (eight heraldic tinctures plus argent, or any colour you pick) and a crest: a shield with one of twelve charges, from a star or a tower to a wolf's head. Someone who married in keeps the colour of their new house and shows the house they were born into as a thin inner border. The name on a coloured box is set in dark or light ink, whichever reads at 4.5:1 or better, in light and dark mode. A legend of the houses in use sits on the chart and goes into every export.

    Big trees: type part of a name or a title in Find to centre and ring that person; Hide descendants in a person's sheet folds their whole branch away behind a "+N" badge, and tapping the badge opens it again.

    Check reads the year number in each person's born and died text and lists every continuity problem: a parent younger than their child, or younger at the birth than the age you set (12 unless you change it; adoptive and foster parents only have to be older); a child born more than a year after a parent died; anyone who is their own ancestor through a loop of parent links; a death before the birth; and, if you turn it on, partners who were never alive at the same time. Tap a problem to centre that person. A date with no number ("the winter the river froze") or with two ("12/3/1802") is listed as not checked, never guessed, and two dates in different eras are not compared, because the check cannot know which era came first. It never changes your tree.

    Private by design

    No account and no upload: the tree is saved in this browser's storage on every change, and nothing you type leaves your device. Clearing site data deletes it, so use Save file to keep a copy or move it to another device, and Open file to load it back.

    Export makes a PNG (twice the on-screen size, light or dark), an SVG with the fonts inside it, or a one-page print you can save as a PDF, all made in this browser. Not yet: no GEDCOM import or export, and a crest is one charge on a plain shield: no uploaded images, quartering or mottoes.

    Reading the chart

    • married
    • partners, not married
    • separated
    • child by birth
    • adopted child
    • fostered child
    • inner border: the house a person was born into
    • other parent unknown (the "?" box)