Show HN: Ancestree – Give your family members biographies

Ancestree, a browser-based family tree app that gives each family member their own mini-biography, launched on Hacker News on August 26, 2026, posted by its creator under the handle Realman78.

Per the Show HN post, the app lets users build a family tree where every person gets a dedicated "book" — a collection of chapters covering what they did, what happened to them, and what they were like. Users can write as much or as little as they want. The tool supports exporting both standard and detailed versions of the family tree, and can compile an individual's chapters into a single long-form biography document.

The creator, posting as Realman78, described the project as a response to a recurring personal experience: learning unexpected facts about older relatives — including, as cited in the HN post, a Croatian grandfather who served in the French marine corps — only through conversation. The motivation, as stated, is preserving stories that currently survive only through re-telling and are easily lost across generations.

A notable technical choice is privacy by design: according to the Show HN post, the app runs entirely in the browser with no account requirement and no server. Nothing a user draws or writes ever leaves their local environment. The project is also fully open-sourced, though no repository link was included in the post.

The app is available at ancestree.marindedic.com. No funding, team size, founding date, or pricing information was mentioned in the source material. The post had received 8 points and no comments at the time of publication.