About Chinese Genealogy
Chinese Genealogy is a free, open platform: families from every place put their genealogy online, and the whole family - young and old, at home and abroad - works on the same genealogy together, and can read it anywhere, at any time.
Why put a genealogy online
A genealogy records where a family comes from: where its founder came from, what each generation of ancestors was called, how each branch carried on the line. A genealogy on paper has its difficulties:
- It is hard to update. Each new edition means gathering the family, collecting records, typesetting and printing - often years of work and a great deal of money, so it happens once in decades. By the time the book is printed, there are children born since who are not in it.
- It is hard to keep. A genealogy is usually printed in a few dozen copies, spread across the branches of the family. Floods, insects, fire, a move: a lost copy is hard to replace.
- It is hard to read. The family lives in many places, some abroad. Seeing the genealogy means going back home to whoever keeps it; finding one person means turning page after page.
- It is hard to pass on. Locked in a chest, the book is seldom opened by the young, who grow ever less familiar with where they come from.
Online, most of these difficulties go away.
What a genealogy gains online
- Read it anywhere, at any time. Open a link on a phone to see the chart and the ancestors' records, and find people by name or courtesy name - no trip home to the book.
- Update it at any time. Newborn children and newly married spouses can be entered right away, rather than in the next edition decades on.
- Share the work. Each branch enters its own line, whose people and history it knows - much faster than one or two people compiling the whole.
- Find your roots. Public genealogies are listed in the directory once approved, found by surname and place; relatives overseas can find where they come from.
- Print it when you like. A genealogy kept online can be made into a typeset PDF - a copy of your own to keep, or to have printed and bound.
An open platform where the whole family edits online
Chinese Genealogy is an open platform: any family can start a genealogy for free, and the whole family - young and old, at home and abroad - can work on the same genealogy together online.
- Open. Anyone can register and start a genealogy for free; anyone can read a public genealogy.
- Everyone can take part. A genealogy's administrator posts its access code in the family's WeChat group; relatives who type it can add newborns, fill in records and correct mistakes, with no account.
- Someone checks. Every change made with the code waits for an administrator to approve it; every change is recorded, and a mistaken one can be undone.
- The genealogy belongs to the family. Each genealogy is managed by the family that made it. This site does not sell genealogies' contents or use them for advertising.
How to invite the family to edit together: see the tutorial Build it together as a family.
What it does
Starting one
The Start a genealogy wizard: an account, the place and surname, the founder, inviting the family - four steps. The genealogy's address is made from its place and surname.
Entering
Add children and spouses; record names, courtesy and art names, generation, birth order, honours, place, and adoption in or out of the line; write biographies of ancestors; record the family's generation poem.
Reading
The genealogy's front page, a chart that opens a generation at a time, and a page for each person; find people by name, courtesy name or pinyin, in simplified or traditional characters; statistics; how any two people are related, and their common ancestor.
Finding a genealogy
Search by surname (in characters or pinyin) and place; browse the directory by region or by surname.
Downloading and sharing
A typeset PDF genealogy in the classic, indented or index style, with the generation column's side and the first page number yours to set; a long chart image; sharing a page to WeChat.
Managing
The access code and an invitation to send with it; who sees it (public, unlisted, private); several administrators; approving changes, and their history; a deleted genealogy can be restored by a system administrator within 90 days.
Languages
Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English; rare characters in a genealogy display properly; and a simplified-traditional converter.
Tutorials
From starting a genealogy and inviting the family to downloading the PDF, every step has an illustrated tutorial.
What it offers
Free
Free to create, free to read, free to download.
Easy
A phone is all it takes to work on your genealogy.
Worldwide
Distance is no obstacle: relatives anywhere in the world can work on it together, and keeping the genealogy gets easier.
Always up to date
Newborn children and newly married spouses can be entered in the genealogy right away.
In the cloud
Stored on a cloud server, to read anywhere, any time.
Privacy for the family
Names are seen only by the genealogy's administrators and the family members they approve, never by passing visitors; the PDF and the lineage chart can be downloaded only by those who may edit.
On privacy: by default names and details are not shown to the public - the chart shows only each person's generation, sex and number of children, and people's pages do not open. A genealogy's administrators can choose to show the names of its earlier generations to the public, but the recent generations (people with fewer than four generations recorded below them) are never shown to the public. The genealogy's administrators, approved linked members and anyone who typed the access code can see everything. Only those who may edit can download the PDF or the lineage image. See the privacy policy.
Credits
The site uses the data, fonts and software below, with thanks to their authors, compilers and contributors.
Data
- The maps of the Places of China, and the names and positions of natural villages: © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
- Townships and administrative villages: the National Bureau of Statistics’ division codes for statistics (2023), as compiled by modood/Administrative-divisions-of-China.
- The regions of the genealogy directory: the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ administrative division codes (2025), as transcribed by yescallop/areacodes (CC0).
- Some townships’ and counties’ positions: Wikidata (CC0).
- The surnames of the villages of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui and Zhongshan: the Index of Clan Names by Villages, compiled by the American Consulate General in Hong Kong in 1963; of Enping’s villages: the Enping county gazetteer. Both as digitised in Friends of Roots’ VillageDB.
- The readings of surnames: the Chinese Wikipedia’s article on each surname.
Fonts
- The serif and sans-serif faces of the pages and the PDF books: Noto Serif SC and Noto Sans SC, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
- The kaishu face of the names in a genealogy and of the site’s name: AR PL UKai, under the Arphic Public License.
- Rare characters: Plangothic (SIL Open Font License 1.1) and Jigmo (CC0).
- The Latin text of the English pages: Manrope, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Software
- The pages’ interface: Bootstrap (MIT License).
- The PDF books: PyMuPDF (GNU AGPL 3.0).
- Cutting fonts: fontTools (MIT License).
- Simplified–traditional conversion: OpenCC (Apache License 2.0).
- Pinyin: pypinyin (MIT License).