No software is ever finished, and Treebard is not an exception to that. "Treebard" is the name of my user interface (buttons and input fields and stuff). "UNIGEDS" is the name of Treebard's internal data structure. UNIGEDS is a SQLite database that is copied by Treebard and other participating genieware vendors to create family trees that can be transferred from app to app without GEDCOM.
The Chapter 3 version of Treebard is free. Chapter 3 of Treebard development ended in July/August 2024 when I stopped working full time on the project. This version can be downloaded from the download page on this website. It represents about 16,000 hours of development and includes all the features listed below, and more. The download includes an .exe version so you can test Treebard without installing Python, as well as a .zip of the entire source code including the sample tree and images.
I've always said that Treebard is free, and the Chapter 3 version download page, as well as the rest of my website, contains no cookies or other tracking devices, I don't ask for your name or your email address, you get the code anonymously and do what you want with it. You and anyone else.
The most recent version of Treebard is an updated version of the Chapter 3 version. It includes bug fixes and added features starting in August 2024. It can be downloaded from the donation page on this website. Some of the bug fixes and added features can be gleaned from our YouTube videos without making a donation. If you make a donation to get Treebard code, it is still public domain, unlicensed, and open source, and it can still be used for anything by you or anyone. You can share copies with your friends or your development team. You can do anything with it that is legal.
Why so flexible? Does Treebard have real value?
I've been around too long to believe that I should try to control what other people do. I truly believe that you can't take it with you. I wrote Treebard for fun and that's what I got out of it. A wonderful experience. Anything else is just gravy.
The value of Treebard is that it was created with an eye to perfection. Most genealogy software is created to sell, so its creators had to "finish" it as quickly as possible and put a lot of time into secondary features as opposed to rewriting features over and over. With the profit motive as captain of the ship, getting the primary features right had to take a back seat. A look around my websites will convince anyone that my focus is on giving historical facts an accurate and detailed representation and designing a user interface that is at the top of its class. I think you'll see that Treebard's list of features is about making genealogy software better, more useful, and more accurate, but less complicated-looking and easier to learn.
Why is Treebard written in Python? Isn't Python a slow-running language? Won't large trees bog down in Python apps?
Python is the perfect language for creating a working model because you can develop apps in Python quickly. In the software industry, it's common to design in Python and translate to a compiled language when the final design has been settled on. I believe that development could possibly be continued in Python, because the Python team is working hard to improve its performance. If you don't plan to create trees with gazillions of people in them, you might as well keep using Python, because writing in Python is relatively easy and therefore quicker for getting things done. Save the technical programming in difficult languages for when you're ready to form a team of developers to handle the work load.
Treebard places work like places in the real world. Hidden from the software user inside Treebard's data structure UNIGEDS, each place is identified uniquely by an ID number, not by its name. Places can have as many names as they need to match the historical facts. A place can have multiple enclosing places or "parent places". For example, there's only one Dallas, Texas but it's been part of multiple parent countries, and is currently distributed among four parent counties. In Treebard this is one Dallas with multiple parents, just like it is in the real world. What about Paris, Texas? In Treebard, it's so hard to accidentally put Paris, Texas in France, you'd have to be asleep to make that mistake. But entering places is easy. If you type a "d" in a place field, the last place you typed which started with a "d" fills in automatically. If that's not the place you wanted, type another letter or two and other places fill in automatically.
Dates should be quick and easy to type, so that's how we made dates work in Treebard. No annoying pop-up calendars to slow you down. You can type date parts in almost any order. Type "est 4 mar 1874" or "1874 4 est mar" or "4 march 1874 est", etc. as the date parts occur to you. When you tab out of the field, the date will be correctly formatted according to the options you choose in Preferences, such as "est 4 March 1874".
When it comes to people's names, a name is a name. You shouldn't have to go from first name field to middle name field to surname field, because doing this would serve no purpose except to slow you down. In Treebard, a person's name is quickly entered in one field. If the person has already been entered, their name fills in automatically. Treebard automatically selects a surname for alphabetizing purposes, but gives you a simple way to change this. For example, in the USA, Richard Van Dyke would be alphabetized under "v", but in the Netherlands, the same name would be alphabetized under "d". Treebard puts you in control of this.
Treebard tracks adoptive parents, foster parents, and guardians with equal status as biological parents. But if you prefer, alt parents can be recorded with the Roles feature, like a witness at a wedding. This is your choice. Role persons are treated the same as tree persons, in case one of them turns out to be a relative; they're just displayed in the Roles Dialog instead of the nuclear families table. The nuclear families table shows all of a person's parents, alt parents, partners, and children in one view.
Treebard shows all of a person's events and attributes in the same place, right under the families table, sorted by date or by event/attribute type if no date is entered. So you see a person's life story in one view, without clicking around searching for things. You don't have to click from view to view and then try to remember what you saw. Our ancestors were people with lives, not conglomerations of data.
Treebard uses the current person model, so that if you're engrossed in your work, you won't accidentally assign events, notes, partners, etc. to the wrong person.
In Treebard, any note can be linked to any number of other elements. The notes dialog includes a search feature so notes of any length can easily be found and re-used. No more copying & pasting notes over and over.
Treebard assigns unique identifiers to citations so they can be selected from a dropdown list and used over and over. No more copying & pasting citations over and over.
Treebard is apolitical and gender neutral. We don't take sides, we record historical facts. If Frank was the mother and Evelyn was the father, we have no opinion about that. Treebard includes four gender designations: female, male, unknown and other. Members of couples are called "partners", not "spouses". No code except biological father and mother depend on traditional gender roles. But no code at all depends on the controversial trends of our times, because we expect these trends to continue changing and Treebard is about history, not current trends.
Treebard has simple graphics features which allow you to crop, label, resize, and copy images. You can assign a caption to an image that will display in text in the images gallery, and place additional text on the border of the image. You choose the color of the border and the text. You can add images to Treebard from any place on your computer, and Treebard does not move or change your originals. You can link any image to any number of persons, places, or sources. When you add a person to the tree, you can link multiple images to the new person at the same time, resizing each image independently.
Treebard recognizes differing tastes in color schemes as well as the needs of the visually impaired and the large proportion of genealogists whose eyesight isn't what it used to be. You can change to any font, add fonts, and display tiny or very large font sizes. You aren't stuck with just a light or dark mode. Treebard comes with dozens of color schemes. You can preview many color schemes in seconds. You can name color schemes, add color schemes in seconds, and delete color schemes. You can change a color in a color scheme or create your own theme from scratch. Changes in font and color scheme take effect immediately, everywhere in the tree. Each tree can have a different color scheme. You don't have to restart the app and you do have control of how the widgets look, but unlike other apps which let you define a color scheme, there's not a lot to do. One or two settings changes all fonts. Choosing one theme or four colors will instantly recolorize the whole app. We know you will love this feature.
It's easy to add types to Treebard: event types, name types, source types, place types, etc.
You can use Treebard to do evidence-based genealogy, conclusion-based genealogy, or a mixture, depending on the needs of the moment. The structure of Treebard's data storage facility UNIGEDS is modeled on the real world, not on GEDCOM or the shortcuts employed by commercial genieware vendors up to now. We re-introduce the essential assertion element which has been swept under the rug by nearly every genealogy software product, so you can easily review how you formed your conclusions about an event, attribute or name. In the many cases where there's only one source, or where the assertion (what the source said) is obvious, you can ignore this feature or add an assertion later if it becomes relevant. No more sifting through stacks of documents to try and figure out why you decided G-G-G-G Aunt Madge was born in September 1843 in Georgia. Treebard's sourcing feature is absolutely unique, and yet it can be ignored or used partially depending on your interests.
Treebard includes a simple prioritized to-do list which is available in every tree.
Treebard's person search dialog helps you find anyone in the tree by any of their names, nicknames, ID numbers, any part of any name, or by their Treebard ID number. The results table shows not only names and ID numbers, but also parents, birth dates, and death dates, to help you tell the difference between John Smith #145 and John Smith #931. Tooltips will appear listing every name a person has when you point at a person in the results table, or you can go to the Names Tab where it's easy to change a name or add a name to the current person, as well as link sources and notes to names.
You can change the current person in Treebard by clicking a name in the person search dialog or control-clicking a name in the families table. Or you can enter any name or Treebard person ID number in the top field and change to that person instantly, by typing just a few characters. If the person doesn't exist in the tree, the Add Person dialog will open. If a name entered into the Add Person dialog already exists, you'll be informed of that. If you change to a person whose name is duplicated in the tree, a dialog will help you decide which person you intended. As you navigate from person to person, Back and Forward arrows save your trail so you can get back to where you were earlier.
Any couple event can be changed to any other couple event. Any non-couple event can be changed to any other non-couple event.
Treebard is devoted to hiding real-world complexity behind a simple, easy-to-learn interface. For example, when Treebard opens you'll be able to read every word on the app. No more truncated table cell content. No more resizing columns. No superfluous chains of redundant, annoying dialogs. No ads, no marketing. You can focus on the genealogy instead of fiddling with the app. Treebard is not about Treebard. It's about preserving historical data in a meaningful, respectful, accurate, and useful interface which you will enjoy using. We have dozens of videos in our YouTube channel Treebard Genealogy Software to show you the development process in detail if you want to use Treebard as a working model for your own project. There are also tour videos demonstrating how to use the features listed here.
Treebard is not meant for daily use but you can use it for anything you want including your daily genealogy. Just be aware that you are the developer, if something is not right about the working model, if you want to change or fix something, or if you want an added feature. Treebard is meant to be expanded upon, to be used as a working model by developers and by genealogists who want to create their own genieware.
GEDCOM import and export work in the source code and in the .exe version, including exception reports so some of the data that's not imported is still preserved and clearly notated for your use. Treebard is not a finished app, so there are a few secondary items that Treebard's GEDCOM features just ignore. But since you have access to the code, its finished features can be used as models for features you create yourself. Treebard is a working model that you or a team of developers or a programmer that you hire can use to help create the genieware application of your dreams.
Treebard and UNIGEDS are 100% public domain, unlicensed products. You can do anything with Treebard that you want. I expect that most people would want to rename their custom product instead of using "Treebard" which is my name for my product.
UNIGEDS on the other hand is meant to replace GEDCOM as a tree-sharing tool. UNIGEDS means UNIversal GEnealogy Data Structure. Genieware vendors who expect their product to be useful will sooner or later transcend the archaic, inadequate GEDCOM model and use UNIGEDS or a descendant of UNIGEDS instead. Participating vendors will be able to advertise a product whose entire tree will transfer flawlessly to other products whose creators are also participants in the UNIGEDS revolution. I hope to see the UNIGEDS banner taken up, I hope to see the name used, but I have no control over this or anything else.
