Ahnenwerk
Ahnenwerk has been running on twelve event types since June. It now has seventeen, plus groups, plus the ability to read and write GEDCOM, the format real genealogy programs use.
Everything here is additive. Trees you built before today open exactly as they were, and nothing gets rewritten until you make an edit yourself.
Names and houses can change now
Until today a person had one name for their whole life, which is a strange thing for a tool built around the idea that lives have history. A name or a house is something that happens on a date, and the tree shows whichever was true in the year you're looking at. Search finds every name someone ever had — you can look a character up by the name you remember instead of the one they were filed under.
That came from a stranger. Someone wrote in on 3 August asking for a name-change event, and for a way to end a parent–child relationship without erasing that it had happened. Both are here. The second one is called severance, and it's the missing opposite of adoption — the tree keeps the history and stops drawing the line.
Groups
Groups mark a set of people who share an origin that isn't descent: an arrival, a founding cohort, an order. Members get a ring in the group's colour, and selecting one draws the threads between them. It adds nothing permanent to your tree.
Duplication and absorption
Duplication and absorption finish the identity set. Duplication makes an independent copy of a person; absorption ends the absorbed and leaves the absorber standing. Defusion is now called splitting, which is what it was always doing — ending one person and starting or restoring several. Old files still load.
GEDCOM, in and out
This is the one that matters if your tree exists somewhere else. Import shows you what it will do before anything is saved. Export gives you the file, a report of what was preserved, approximated or dropped, and a plain-text companion listing everything GEDCOM has no way to say. Nothing is guessed. Where a faithful conversion isn't possible, it tells you. Inventing a plausible link would be worse than admitting the gap.
The Markdown export was rewritten
It used to emit a wiki-shaped document full of invented page identifiers, which was useful to roughly one person. It's now a plain readable report of who exists and what happened to them.
And tablets work
The canvas only ever listened for a mouse, so on an iPad without one you couldn't pan or zoom at all. You could open a tree and then do nothing with it. Someone reported that on 11 August. One finger pans, two fingers zoom.
Two of the changes in this release exist because two people who aren't me wrote in. That's a good ratio for a tool with no account system and no way to reach its users, and both arrived through the feedback form on this site.
Open the Egyptian gods tree to see the identity events on something familiar, or read the full changelog.