Dynastia

Dynastia is a web application for family trees. A family tree usually starts with a grandmother, a box of photos and a notebook where someone wrote down birth dates thirty years ago. Then come an extract from the parish register, a scan of a baptism certificate and a few names from family stories that nobody can place. Dynastia keeps all of this in one place: people, relationships, places, dates, sources and memories. The interface is available in Czech, English, German, French and Polish. A family tree can be shared with other users, who then see it under "Shared with me".

Why a spreadsheet or a big genealogy service is not enough

A spreadsheet can hold a few dozen names, but nobody can read the relationships from it, and a second marriage or half-siblings break it. Large services such as MyHeritage, Ancestry or FamilySearch have huge databases, but the family tree is managed on their terms. Dynastia does not lock data in: a family tree can be imported and exported in GEDCOM 7.0, the current version of the standard genealogy programs use to exchange data. The import page has instructions on how to export a file from each of the three services named above.

What genealogists get

• A family tree can be shown in four ways: as a classic tree, as an ancestor chart, as a descendant chart and as a fan chart. One switch changes the view, and a person found by search is located in the tree automatically.
• Places of birth and death are shown on an OpenStreetMap map, births in green and deaths in grey. The map shows at a glance where a family came from and where it spread.
• Each person has a timeline of life events: birth, marriages, death and other events.
• Memories can include photos, written stories, audio recordings and documents with a date, place and description.
• Sources have a type (parish register, census, archive, website, book, photograph, interview), a citation, a link, an archive and a shelf mark. For every fact, you can trace where it came from.
• The relationship calculator finds the common ancestor of two people and names the relationship in Czech including its degree, for example cousin, great-aunt or double cousin.
• Search covers all of a user's family trees at once: names, places and notes.

A family tree for the wall and for the archive

Print output is a separate part of the application. An export lets you choose a visual style (an illustrated tree with a trunk and leaves, a circular ancestor fan, classic cards, portrait medallions or a leaf label), the person the tree is drawn from, the number of generations, paper size and orientation. The theme can be parchment, sepia, forest, white or the gold Heritage theme. For the illustrated tree you set the colour and thickness of the branches and the colour, density and size of the leaves, which can be green, autumn, gold or sepia. Settings can be saved as a preset and reused next time. Besides the tree, Dynastia can print a family chronicle.

How it works

The web application is written in PHP on the Nette framework, and the map uses OpenStreetMap. The mobile app for Android and iOS is being built in Flutter and talks to the website through its REST API. Unlike the website, it does not show the whole tree on the phone, as that would not fit on a small screen. The home screen focuses on one person: parents above, partners beside, children below in birth order. Tapping a relative moves the view to them, and the back button steps back through the history of jumps. A second view draws a family map with generations around the selected person, which can be zoomed with two fingers. The app has the same five languages as the website.

Who it is for

• Families who want to put together stories, photos and parish register extracts and keep them somewhere other than a single box.
• Genealogists who already have a family tree in another program or with a foreign service and want to move it over via GEDCOM.
• Relatives spread across Europe: the tree can be shared with them and each of them can switch the application to Czech, German, Polish, French or English.
• Anyone who wants to print a large family tree for the wall for an anniversary or a family reunion.

Privacy

A family tree contains personal data of living people, so it is behind a sign-in. You can sign in with an email address or user name and a password, or with a passkey without a password. An account can be protected with two-factor authentication, and a browser the user trusts can be marked as trusted so the code does not have to be entered at every sign-in.

Project status

Dynastia has been in development since 2025 and runs at dynastia.nks-hub.cz, but registration is closed for now. Without an account you only see the sign-in page. The mobile app is in development and is not yet on Google Play or the App Store.

Getting started

• Web application: dynastia.nks-hub.cz

Source code

Dynastia is our own project and its code is not public. Want to try it before registration opens, or need something similar for an archive or an association? Write to dev@nks-hub.cz or use the enquiry form.