# Provenance **Where it came from matters.** Provenance is self-hostable software for tracing where you come from — your family *and* your land. Build a family tree, document every claim with real sources, reconstruct the chain of ownership behind a piece of property, and keep all of it in a format you control, on infrastructure you run. Your history shouldn't live behind a subscription. Your data shouldn't be someone else's product. The story of where you came from belongs to you — and to whoever comes after. --- ## Why "Provenance" Museums and collectors use the word for the chain of custody behind an object: where it came from, who held it, how it got here. A painting without provenance is just a painting. A painting *with* provenance is a story. People and land work the same way. A name on a tree is just a name. A name with sources, photos, letters, and the small details of a life — that's a person. A parcel of farmland traced from its original federal patent through every deed and heir to the present day — that's a story too. Provenance treats both as facets of the same thing. Every fact links to its source. Every claim can be traced. Nothing is just asserted; everything is shown. ## What it does - **Build a tree that holds up.** People, relationships, events, and places — with every fact linked to the document, photo, or record it came from. - **Bring your own archive.** Scans, PDFs, photos, audio recordings — first-class citizens, not afterthoughts. - **A research assistant that proposes, never overwrites.** The built-in AI assistant searches legal sources, lays out what it found, and waits for your approval before anything touches your data. You can point it at the major model providers or a self-hosted model — your keys, your choice. - **Standards over silos.** GEDCOM import and export (5.5.1 / 7 common subset) — duplicate-aware import, citation-preserving export. Migrate in, migrate out. - **Privacy you control.** Public, members-only (any signed-in user on your instance), unlisted, or private per tree; any individual can be hidden; living people are protected by default. - **Find your people.** When another user's tree overlaps with yours, Provenance can surface an anonymous "possible match" — and only connects you if you both say yes. - **Run it your way.** Container-native. Self-host behind Caddy and, if you like, a Cloudflare Tunnel. Multi-tenant, so your whole extended family — or a whole community of strangers — can coexist on one deployment. One-command backups (Postgres + object storage) and an instance-owner admin role keep operations in your hands. **Where it's headed — trace the land, not just the family.** The same source-backed treatment for *property*: parcels, deeds, and ownership events, reconstructing chain-of-title and tying land to the people who held it. The people side ships today; the land half is on the roadmap, not yet built — but it's why Provenance exists, not an afterthought. ## Who it's for - The person who became the keeper of the photos after a parent passed - Farm and rural families tracing land back to the original patent - Researchers who want their citations to actually mean something - Adoptees and donor-conceived people piecing together a fuller picture - Anyone who looked at the big genealogy subscriptions and thought *I don't want my family history to be someone else's recurring revenue* ## Principles - **Your data is yours.** Open formats. Export anytime. Self-host anywhere. - **Sources or it didn't happen.** Every fact can carry citations. The record holds what you know *and* how you know it. - **The assistant serves you.** AI proposes; you decide. No autonomous writes, ever. - **Honest about hard things.** Adoption, estrangement, complicated parentage, name changes, people who don't want to be on a tree — treated as normal, not edge cases. - **No dark patterns.** No paywalled hints. No surprise upsells. No "you have new ancestors waiting" emails. ## Licensing Provenance is **source-available**, not open source (yet). It is licensed under the [Business Source License 1.1](LICENSE): - **Free forever for personal, family, and non-commercial use** — self-host all you like. - **Commercial hosting for a fee is not permitted** without a separate license from the author. - **Each release converts to AGPL-3.0** (a true open-source license) four years after it ships. In plain terms: run it for yourself, your family, or your community at no cost, forever. You just can't take this code and sell it as a hosted service — that's reserved for a possible future first-party offering. See [LICENSE](LICENSE) for the exact terms. ## Status Early and moving fast. The product is being built in the open, commit by commit, and stood up in a live home lab as it goes. See [docs/PRD.md](docs/PRD.md) for the product requirements and roadmap. If the principles above resonate, watch the repo, open an issue with your use case, or pitch in. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md). --- ***Provenance.*** *Where it came from matters.*