A local-first genealogy & historical-research workbench.
Build your family tree, investigate connections on an infinite board, map your ancestors across time, import and export GEDCOM — all on your own machine, no cloud, no account, your data never leaves your computer.
🌐 treemonk.eu · ⬇️ Download · 🐛 Issues
Available in English · Deutsch · Magyar · Français · Italiano · Español · Русский · Polski · Português — auto-detected on first launch.
- 🔒 Local-first & private. Everything is a single SQLite file on your disk. No cloud, no account, no telemetry — your family data stays with you.
- 🆓 Free. Free for personal and other noncommercial use, forever (see License).
- 🌍 Multilingual. Full English, German, Hungarian, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish and Portuguese UI (auto-detected on first launch).
- 🪶 Lightweight & offline. Works without an internet connection (map tiles being the obvious exception).
- 🔌 Yours to automate. An optional, local-only HTTP API lets your own scripts — or an AI assistant you connect — read and (if you allow it) edit your tree. Off by default.
- Windows — easiest from the
Microsoft Store
(verified install, automatic updates) — or grab
TreeMonk-Setup-x.y.z.exefrom the Releases page - Linux —
TreeMonk-x.y.z.AppImage(or.deb) from the Releases page or treemonk.eu
The app checks for updates and tells you when a new version is available; your data is always kept.
No official macOS build is published — released
.dmgs would be ad-hoc signed but not notarized. macOS users: see Building on macOS below.
A full gallery and feature tour lives on treemonk.eu.
An infinite, zoomable canvas. Drag loose notes, people and document images onto it and draw connections. Set whether a new link means Parent→Child, Spouse, or Child→Parent, then Merge to Tree to promote verified connections into the structured database.
Auto-laid-out, collapsible pedigree & portrait charts. Each card shows the name, life-span, spouse and attached-document count. Fan/pedigree layouts, printable.
A roomy profile page with auto-saving fields, a timeline of life events (with optional world-history context), a photo gallery and a deep-zoom viewer for reading high-resolution scans. Profile photos can be repositioned & zoomed.
Plot every birth/marriage/death across a historical map (real period borders), animate migration paths, and read nearby historical events. The map remembers your view, selection and filters between visits.
A full-width, tiled statistics view — demographics, surnames, given names, places, occupations, lifespans, births vs. deaths by century — every card clickable to drill into the people behind it, plus a multi-page PDF export.
Import any GEDCOM file and export a valid GEDCOM 5.5.1 (whole tree or a subset). Place names are standardized automatically on import.
FamilySearch sync and a Pro edition — two-way contribution back to the FamilySearch tree plus advanced research tools — are in development. See treemonk.eu.
A data-issue checker (impossible dates, duplicates, …), one-click merge of duplicate people, surname & place normalization, and a full audit log — every change is recorded and undoable.
Search people and documents from the top bar; results appear live as you type.
TreeMonk can act as a local HTTP API for your own scripts and tools: search people, walk relations and ancestors, read timelines and statistics, open attached document images, and — only if you allow writes — create and edit people, families and life events.
- Off by default, opt-in in Settings (Settings → Local API). Nothing changes unless you turn it on.
- Strictly local: the server binds to
127.0.0.1only and every request needs the Bearer token generated in Settings. Writes sit behind a second toggle, go through the same repository layer as the UI (so the audit log and undo history are kept), and open windows refresh live. - Self-documenting: with the server enabled, open
http://127.0.0.1:27007/docsfor the built-in offline documentation (English · Deutsch · Magyar · Français) andhttp://127.0.0.1:27007/api/v1/openapi.jsonfor the OpenAPI 3.1 spec. No online service and no built-in AI are involved — this only lets tools you choose, running on your machine, talk to your local database.
TreeMonk is local-first. Your tree, photos and documents are stored only on
your computer (under your user-data folder, as a SQLite database + media files).
Nothing is uploaded anywhere. The only network calls are opt-in: map tiles,
optional place geocoding, and the update check. The optional
local API is
off by default and, when enabled, listens on 127.0.0.1 only — it is never
reachable from the network.
- Node.js 20+ and npm (the release CI runs Node 20).
- macOS only: a full Xcode install (App Store → Xcode, then
xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer). CommandLineTools alone is not enough —better-sqlite3's postinstall rebuilds against Electron and its C++ headers are only on the full Xcode toolchain. Linux/Windows builds work fine with just the OS package manager's toolchain.
# 1. Install dependencies (postinstall rebuilds better-sqlite3 for Electron)
npm install
# 2. Run in development (hot reload)
npm run dev
# 3. Production build
npm run build
# 4. Package a Linux app (AppImage + .deb)
npm run dist:linux
# 5. Package a Windows app (NSIS installer)
npm run dist:win
# 6. Package a macOS app (.dmg, Apple Silicon) — requires Xcode, see above
npm run dist:mac
# Typecheck both processes / run tests
npm run typecheck
npm run test:runnpm run dist:* runs npm run fetch:famous, which downloads and compacts the
notable-people dataset into resources/famous/ (git-ignored).
Data: Pantheon 1.0 (Yu, Ronen, Hidalgo et al., MIT Media Lab), CC BY 4.0 — see https://pantheon.world. Matches are heuristic (name + birth year).
If the native SQLite module mismatches your Electron version:
npm run rebuild # electron-rebuild -f -w better-sqlite3Released .dmgs would be ad-hoc signed but not notarized, so Apple
would block the first launch behind a Gatekeeper dialog that says the
app "is from an unidentified developer". macOS users have two
options:
-
Build it yourself. All you need is Xcode (App Store) and Node 20+ — see Prerequisites above. Then:
git clone https://github.com/n1kozor/Tree-Monk.git cd Tree-Monk npm install # postinstall rebuilds better-sqlite3 for Electron npm run dist:mac # → release/TreeMonk-x.y.z-arm64.dmg
Open the
.dmg, dragTreeMonk.appto Applications. On the first launch, right-click the app → Open → Open in the dialog (one-time Gatekeeper bypass; subsequent launches are normal double-click).If
npm install's postinstall fails with'climits' file not found, your toolchain isn't pointing at full Xcode —xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer. -
Wait for a notarized release. Track this repository (Releases · Watch → Custom → Releases) — if/when a paid Apple Developer ID is set up, the build pipeline can sign and notarize automatically.
src/
├─ shared/ # types + IPC contract shared by both processes
├─ main/ # Electron main process (Node + SQLite)
│ ├─ ipc.ts # registers every ipcMain.handle
│ ├─ db/ # connection, schema, repositories, tree projection, merge
│ ├─ api/ # opt-in local HTTP API + offline /docs
│ └─ gedcom/ # parser, import, export
├─ preload/ # contextBridge → window.api (typed)
└─ renderer/src/ # React app (Zustand store, i18n hu/en/de/fr/it/es/ru/pl/pt, components)
Stack: Electron + electron-vite · React 18 + TypeScript + Tailwind ·
better-sqlite3 (main process, over typed IPC) · Zustand · MapLibre GL ·
@xyflow/react · i18next.
Data flow: renderer → window.api.* (preload) → ipcRenderer.invoke →
ipcMain.handle → repository → SQLite. All data lives under
app.getPath('userData')/data.
You may not sell, lease, or sublicense to any third party any data obtained from FamilySearch International through TreeMonk. Using TreeMonk as a tool while providing your own professional research services is not affected — the prohibition applies to trading in the raw data itself.
TreeMonk is source-available, not open source: the full source is public and free to read, build and modify, but the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 limits use to noncommercial purposes, so it does not meet the OSI Open Source Definition.
You may use, copy, modify and share TreeMonk for personal, hobby, educational, research, charitable and other noncommercial purposes. You may not sell it, resell it, or use it as part of a commercial product or paid service. For a commercial license, please get in touch via treemonk.eu.
© 2026 TreeMonk — n1kozor