Guest Post: Tree Prism -- Nine Ways To Look At a Family Tree

 I received this guest post from Konstantin Popov of Tree Prism recently:

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Tree Prism: Nine Ways to Look at a Family Tree

by Konstantin Popov

A reader of my blog once sent me an article about the many ways people have drawn family trees. I wanted to try those ideas on my own tree, and once they worked, it seemed a shame to keep them to myself. So I turned them into Tree Prism, a free tool that opens a GEDCOM file in your browser and shows it in nine different views.

You start with the GEDCOM file your genealogy program exports. RootsMagic, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Family Tree Maker, Gramps and others can all create one. Pick a person, and the views redraw around them. If you'd like to look around first, click "Open a sample": it loads a made-up town of about 3,000 people.

Some of the views help you notice things in your tree:

• Timeline places your ancestors' lives against the history of their country: the rulers, the wars and epidemics, and record milestones like census years.

• Lexis shows age and contemporaries in one diagram, so you can see who was alive at the same time as whom.

• Branches maps a person's descendants and flags records that look incomplete.
Others just turned out pretty enough to print and frame:

Others just turned out pretty enough to print and frame:

• Tree, the classic chart of ancestors and descendants, with several print themes.

• - Fan, as a full circle, a half circle or a "butterfly."

• - Descendant Sun, Lifespans on a circular time scale, Constellation, and Galaxy, which puts relatives by blood and marriage on one chart.

Any chart can be saved as a PDF or as a PNG at up to 600 dpi, which leaves plenty of room for a large print. If you plan to share a chart, an export option replaces the names and dates of anyone who may still be living with "Details hidden."

Two more tabs go beyond the pictures. 

• Analysis runs date checks, lists brick walls, and looks at marriage and first-child patterns, wedding seasons and longevity. 

• Facts finds small stories in your tree, such as which ancestors were contemporaries of famous people, and turns them into cards you can share.

Privacy matters to me as much as the charts. Your GEDCOM file never leaves your browser. There's no account to create, and there are no ads or analytics. The details are at https://prism.vibe-genealogy.com/privacy/. The flip side of doing everything locally is that a very large tree can be slow on an older phone or computer.

I built Tree Prism with Claude Code and Codex, AI coding agents working under my direction. There's no AI model inside the tool itself. The chart ideas come from published visualizations, and the sources are credited in the app.

It's free and still a very early prototype. If you find a bug or have an idea for a chart you'd like to see, please write to me at hello@vibe-genealogy.com.

Try it at https://prism.vibe-genealogy.com

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I tried Tree Prism with a small GEDCOM file (2,600 persons) and it worked fine.  I'm a little confused by some of the diagrams that the program can produce.  Here is my Family Tree (8 generations) in the Butterfly view:

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I was contacted by Konstantin Popov, who developed Tree Prism, recently and I  offered to publish a guest post about it.  Thank you, Konstantin.

 I welcome Guest Posts on Genealogy and Family History topics.  

Disclosure: I received no remuneration to publish this blog post and to use and describe this FREE product.

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