3.7 KiB
Provenance
Your family, traced.
Provenance is open-source genealogy software for people who want to do this right. Build your family tree, gather the documents, link the sources, and pass it all down in a format that will outlive any subscription, any company, any platform.
Your history shouldn't live behind a paywall. Your data shouldn't be a product. The story of where you came from belongs to you — and to whoever comes after.
Why "Provenance"
Museums 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.
Families 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. That's provenance.
We built this software around that idea. 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 actually holds up. Add people, relationships, events, and places. Link every fact to the document, photo, or record it came from. When your cousin asks "how do we know Great-Grandma was born in Trieste?" — you can show them.
- Bring your own archive. Drop in scans, PDFs, audio recordings of your grandmother, the photo album your uncle finally digitized. Provenance treats them as first-class citizens, not attachments.
- Standards over silos. Full GEDCOM 7 import and export. Your data is yours, in a format every other genealogy tool can read. Migrate in, migrate out, fork the project — it's all the same to us.
- Run it your way. Self-host on a home server, run it locally on your laptop, or deploy it for your whole extended family. No accounts required. No telemetry. No "premium tier."
- Collaborate without the platform. Share a tree with relatives via a link, a local network, or a synced folder. Merge contributions. Resolve conflicts. The family historian role is finally something more than one person typing alone.
Who it's for
- The person in their family who became the keeper of the photos after a parent passed
- Researchers who want their citations to actually mean something
- Adoptees and donor-conceived people piecing together a fuller picture
- Diaspora families reconnecting branches across continents
- Anyone who looked at the big genealogy subscriptions and thought I don't want my family tree to be someone else's recurring revenue
Principles
- Your data is yours. Plain files. Open formats. Export anytime. Delete anytime. We mean it because we can't do anything else — there's no server of ours holding it.
- Sources or it didn't happen. Every fact can carry citations. The tree records what you know and how you know it.
- Built to outlast us. Open source, permissively licensed, designed so a determined cousin in 2075 can still open your files and read them.
- Honest about hard things. Families include adoption, estrangement, complicated parentage, name changes, and people who don't want to be on a tree. Provenance treats those as normal, not edge cases.
- No dark patterns. No hint matches dangling behind a paywall. No surprise DNA upsell. No emails about "you have new ancestors waiting."
Get started
git clone https://git.jpaul.io/justin/provenance
cd provenance
./provenance init
Or download a release build for macOS, Windows, or Linux. (Coming soon.)
Status
Early days. The project is in active design and the codebase is forming. If the principles above resonate with you, watch the repo, open an issue with your use case, or reach out.
License
Provenance. Where it came from matters.