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.

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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.
• Trace the land, not just the family. Properties are first-class. Record ownership events (grants, deeds, inheritances, sales), reconstruct chain-of-title, and tie parcels to the people who held them.
• 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. Full GEDCOM 7 import and export. Migrate in, migrate out.
• Privacy you control. Public, 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.

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:

• 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 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 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.

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Provenance. Where it came from matters.