How Ahnenwerk works

Getting started

When you launch Ahnenwerk you land on the setting picker. A setting is one world — one tree. Create a new setting, open an existing one, or load one of the three built-in examples (the British Crown, the Egyptian Gods, Julio-Claudian Rome) to see a finished tree.

Everything is stored locally in your browser and saved automatically as you work — there is no account and nothing is uploaded. To move a world between devices, or to back it up, use Import / Export (JSON). You can also import a GEDCOM file after reviewing its conversion report. Deleting a setting is gated behind typing DELETE so you can't lose a world by accident.

The event model

This is the one idea that makes Ahnenwerk different. People are thin records — a name and a few optional fields. Every relationship lives in an event. A birth records the child and its parents; a marriage records the partners; a death closes a life. The tree you see is derived from those events every time anything changes, so it's always consistent. Edit or delete an event and the graph re-derives on the spot.

You add events from a person's side panel (click a person to open it) via + Event, or by editing existing ones in that person's event list. Seventeen event types cover ordinary genealogy and stranger identity histories: birth, death, marriage, divorce, adoption, severance, attribute, fusion, splitting, duplication, absorption, body-swap, reincarnation, possession, custom, succession, and membership.

Births & parents

A birth event names the person being born and their parents. Parents are optional and unlimited: zero parents (a root of the tree), one, two, or more than two for multi-parent births. Compatible settings may also use a non-person participant when something genuinely belongs in the lineage. Cohorts and factions are represented as Groups, not as people or parents.

Adoption is a separate event with at least one adoptive parent that adds a parent–child link without claiming a biological birth, drawn as its own dashed line. Severance records that a parent–child relationship ended without erasing its history.

Names & houses over time

An attribute event changes a person's regular name or house from a date forward. Keep the earliest value on the person record; the default canvas shows the latest value, while the timeline, search, house colors, and house filter respect the whole history. Regnal names still take precedence in the default name view.

Marriages, divorce & unions

A marriage joins two people; their shared children hang beneath the couple from a central junction. Remarriages are fine — a person can have several partners over time, and the layout keeps each couple together. A divorce event marks a marriage as ended; the connector is restyled (a slashed, dashed double line) rather than removed, so the history stays visible.

Lifespans & multi-phase lives

A person's dates come from their events: a birth opens a life and a death closes it. But a life can have several phases — if a character is born, ends in a fusion, is later restored by a splitting, and dies again, every birth→end phase is shown (for example -18 – 10 · 43 – 78). A fusion, splitting, or absorption that ends a person counts as an end-of-phase, the same as a death.

Titles & lines of succession

A title is a thing that passes down a line over time — a crown, a high office, a hereditary rank. Create titles in the Titles panel (name, optional house, optional note, an optional line color). The list of who held it when is derived from succession events, never stored by hand.

A succession event acts on one title with one or more holders and an action:

• hold — these people become the holders (replacing anyone not relisted).
• cohold — add holders alongside the current ones (co-monarchy, disputed claim).
• end — remove these holders (an abdication; vacancy until the next hold).

A holder's death, fusion, splitting, or absorption automatically ends their tenure — but never starts one, so a death leaves the title vacant (an interregnum) until an explicit hold. Overlapping holders are allowed. On the canvas a title draws as a single colored thread linking its holders in time order, with a small colored pip on each holder's card; a per-title toggle shows or hides the whole thread and its pips at once. Select a title in the panel to see its full ordered reign list.

If a person has a regnal name set (a throne name), it shows by default; the name views cycle regnal → regular → nickname.

Exotic relationships

These are the cases ordinary genealogy tools can't represent. Each is its own event type with its own connector style.

• Fusion — two or more inputs merge into one output. The inputs end (they don't die and aren't deleted), so they can be brought back later.
• Splitting — ends one source and starts or restores its outputs. Any output a fusion had previously ended is restored to the tree in its original place; outputs that never existed before are created one generation below.
• Duplication — creates one or more independent copies while the source continues.
• Absorption — keeps the absorber active while the absorbed participants end.
• Body-swap — two characters exchange bodies; the link records the swap.
• Reincarnation — a directional soul link from a past life to a new one (drawn from the earlier life forward).
• Possession — a directional link from a possessor to the host whose body they seize, with a releasable interval; the possessor may be an entity.
• Custom records a named process that needs no new built-in semantics and can optionally draw a neutral connection between two or more participants.

On large trees, broad identity-operation and body-swap arcs draw only when you hover, select, or focus a node, so dense canvases stay readable.

Groups & membership

Groups represent cohorts, waves, factions, or gatherings without inventing genealogy. Membership is recorded with dated join and leave events. Toggle a group to ring its members; select it to show a temporary hub and threads. A person may belong to several groups, and the timeline scrubber applies to dated membership.

Moving around the canvas

• Pan by dragging the background; zoom with the wheel. Zooming out steps through levels of detail: full cards → names → family blocks.
• Click a person to select them and open the side panel; double-click to enter focus mode (their ancestors and descendants, everything else dimmed).
• Relate (side panel): pick a second person and Ahnenwerk highlights and spells out the shortest relationship chain between them.
• Collapse / expand a subtree from the side panel to tuck away branches you're not working on.
• Timeline (bottom center): scrub to a year — the unborn hide, the dead and ended dim, later events vanish, and positions stay put.
• House filter (toolbar): dim everyone outside one family while keeping married-ins bright.

Layout & pinning

Ahnenwerk lays the tree out automatically — generations, couples kept together, parents centered over their children, special links routed around cards. Auto-arrange re-runs that layout for the whole tree (or just a selection).

To place someone by hand, just drag them — that pins the node, and it stays exactly where you put it while the rest of the tree flows around it. Unpin from the side panel to hand the node back to automatic layout. A lock toggle freezes the layout so nothing moves by accident, and a fully manual mode turns auto-positioning off entirely so every node stays where it sits.

Houses, colors & connections

Give a person a house / family and their card takes on that house's accent color (and houses drive the far-zoom blocks). Set house colors in the Houses panel and a title's color in its edit form; both are saved with the setting.

The connections legend lets you toggle each link type on or off — turn off marriages, identity operations, or any title thread, to declutter while you work. The edge vocabulary: solid = lineage · double brass = marriage (slashed = divorce) · dashed = adoption · converging ember = fusion / splitting / absorption · steel = duplication · dotted arc = body-swap, with reincarnation and possession drawn as their own directional links.

Export

From the toolbar you can export your world four ways:

• JSON — the complete setting; re-import it anywhere, back it up, or hand-edit it.
• Markdown — a portable readable report with plain names, timelines, titles, and Groups; no wiki-specific markup.
• PNG — an image of the whole tree (rendered at full resolution) or just the current view.
• GEDCOM 7 — a standard genealogy file plus a conversion report and copyable text for anything GEDCOM cannot represent.

Because export is one click and the format is plain, your data is never held hostage — you can leave Ahnenwerk at any time and take your whole world with you.

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