justin
c5a2a7f0d4
The Tree view, People (Family) view, and person detail page each tracked the "current person" independently, so moving between them reset you to the home person. The detail page's "← Back to tree" link also pointed at the People view (not the Tree) and carried no person, so it always landed on the default person. Make the focused person a URL-encoded concept that travels across views: - Tree and People views read ?focus=<id> on load and mirror the focused person back into the URL via router.replace (no history spam), so leaving and returning keeps you centered where you were. Bookmarks/shared links also resolve to the right person. - "Open person" links carry ?from=tree | ?from=people. - The detail page's back link is now origin-aware: "← Back to Tree" → /tree?focus=<id> or "← Back to People" → /?focus=<id>, returning you in place instead of to the home person. - Add a "View in tree →" link on the detail page — the previously missing direct jump from a person to the tree re-rooted on them. - person→person relationship links (and create-relative redirect) pass `from` through so click-chains keep their anchor. Also gitignore *.tsbuildinfo (Next build artifact). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Signed-off-by: Justin Paul <justin@jpaul.me>
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.
- 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.
Provenance. Where it came from matters.