Family Tree SSG
Heritage
Your bloodline, sovereign.
The Problem
Your ancestry lives on someone else's servers
Corporate genealogy platforms hold your family data behind subscriptions, terms of service, and data-harvesting agreements. Your lineage is their product. Export options are limited. Migration is painful. They own the presentation.
When they change pricing, you pay or lose access to your own family. When they get acquired, your data changes hands without your consent. When they shut down, generations of research vanish.
Heritage puts your ancestry where it belongs: in your hands.
Origin
Built because it had to exist
The person behind Wilderness Interactive is a confirmed direct descendant of Rollo, the Viking chieftain who founded Normandy in 911, and Richard the Fearless, third Duke of Normandy. Confirmed through generations of family letters and historical records, not speculative genealogy.
When you discover your bloodline reaches back over a thousand years to some of the most consequential figures in European history, you need a tool that does that lineage justice. Not a corporate platform with a monthly fee. A sovereign site you build yourself.
Heritage was built for exactly this. The demo tree below shows the real Norman ducal line from Rollo to William the Conqueror.
How It Works
Data in. Tree out.
Define
People, relationships, and unions declared as plain Rust data. Names, dates, birthplaces, titles, notes.
Build
Citadel serialises the data to JSON and generates a single static HTML page with the embedded tree engine.
Explore
Open in any browser. Zoom, pan, click. Password-protected. No server, no database, no dependencies.
Interactive Tree
Dukes of Normandy
Zoom and pan. Click a person to see details.
Features
Everything a family tree needs. Nothing it doesn't.
Zoomable Interface
Mouse wheel zoom from 10% to 300%. Pan by dragging. The tree scales to any size — ten people or ten thousand.
SVG Connections
Union links between partners. Parent-child lines with shared horizontal bars. Every relationship rendered as clean vector connections.
Password Protected
Client-side gate keeps casual visitors out. Your family data is visible only to people who have the password.
Private Data Submodule
Family data lives in a separate private repository. Public tool, private tree. Share the code without sharing the names.
Detail Cards
Click any person for full detail: birth, death, birthplace, title, notes, parents, children, partners. Everything in one panel.
Static Output
One HTML file. No server. No database. Host it anywhere — GitHub Pages, a VPS, a USB stick. It just works.
Architecture
Rust data. Citadel pipeline. Browser rendering.
Person Relationship Union
Static Rust structs. Names, dates, connections. Compiled into the binary.
serde_json Citadel Decrees
Serialise to JSON. Inject via decree placeholders. Generate full HTML page.
ZUI Engine SVG Canvas Layout Solver
Two-pass layout: measure subtree widths bottom-up, assign positions top-down. Render to SVG + HTML nodes.
Built With
Your ancestry. Your sovereignty.
Zero data harvesting. Zero subscriptions. A Rust binary that turns your family data into an interactive tree you own forever.
View on GitHub