65 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
# Provenance
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**Where it came from matters.**
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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.
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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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---
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## Why "Provenance"
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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.
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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.
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Every fact links to its source. Every claim can be traced. Nothing is just asserted; everything is shown.
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## What it does
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- **Build a tree that holds up.** People, relationships, events, and places — with every fact linked to the document, photo, or record it came from.
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- **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.
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- **Bring your own archive.** Scans, PDFs, photos, audio recordings — first-class citizens, not afterthoughts.
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- **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.
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- **Standards over silos.** Full GEDCOM 7 import and export. Migrate in, migrate out.
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- **Privacy you control.** Public, unlisted, or private per tree; any individual can be hidden; living people are protected by default.
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- **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.
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- **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.
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## Who it's for
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- The person who became the keeper of the photos after a parent passed
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- Farm and rural families tracing land back to the original patent
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- Researchers who want their citations to actually mean something
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- Adoptees and donor-conceived people piecing together a fuller picture
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- Anyone who looked at the big genealogy subscriptions and thought *I don't want my family history to be someone else's recurring revenue*
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## Principles
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- **Your data is yours.** Open formats. Export anytime. Self-host anywhere.
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- **Sources or it didn't happen.** Every fact can carry citations. The record holds what you know *and* how you know it.
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- **The assistant serves you.** AI proposes; you decide. No autonomous writes, ever.
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- **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.
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- **No dark patterns.** No paywalled hints. No surprise upsells. No "you have new ancestors waiting" emails.
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## Licensing
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Provenance is **source-available**, not open source (yet). It is licensed under the [Business Source License 1.1](LICENSE):
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- **Free forever for personal, family, and non-commercial use** — self-host all you like.
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- **Commercial hosting for a fee is not permitted** without a separate license from the author.
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- **Each release converts to AGPL-3.0** (a true open-source license) four years after it ships.
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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.
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## Status
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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.
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If the principles above resonate, watch the repo, open an issue with your use case, or pitch in. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md).
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---
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***Provenance.*** *Where it came from matters.*
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