OikogenYour family's story belongs to your family
Oikogen began with a simple need: a way to pass on what I know about my family without handing it to a company.
How it came about
Every family carries knowledge that isn't written down anywhere. Who married whom. Which town someone left, and why. The nickname nobody can explain anymore. It lives in a few people's memories and travels the slow way: at kitchen tables, on long phone calls, in stories told more than once. When those people are gone, much of it goes with them.
I wanted to write it down and hand it on. But the usual way to keep a family tree online starts with an account, and ends with your family's details on a company's servers: the names of living relatives, their birthdays, where they lived, who is related to whom. That's some of the most personal information there is, and most of the people it describes never agreed to share it. Giving it away felt wrong. I couldn't promise my family what would happen to it later, because that wouldn't be up to me.
So I built the app I needed. There's no account. The family tree lives on your own device, and I never see what you put in. Passing on your family's story should feel like handing down a box of letters, not filling in a form for someone else's database.
What Oikogen is for
Oikogen helps families capture what they know, the names, places and dates and the stories behind them, and pass it to the next generation, while it stays in the family's hands, not a company's.
- Tell it what you know. Type or say it in your own words, and Oikogen builds the family tree from them.
- Keep where each fact came from. Every fact remembers the words it came from, so whoever reads it later knows its source.
- Keep it yours. No account, and your family data never leaves your device.
- Pass it on. Export a file and give it to family the way you choose. When a relative imports it, they decide who's who before anything merges.
The name
Oikogen comes from the Greek oikogeneia (οικογένεια), “family”. The word is built from two older ones: oikos, the home or household, and genea, a generation or lineage. Put together, it means the household across generations.
The mark says the same thing: a roof for the home, and a leaf for what grows from it, one generation to the next.
Credits
Oikogen is built on open work by others. Thank you.
- Language models: Oikogen's models are fine-tuned from Qwen, by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud, Apache License 2.0.
- Speech recognition: Whisper by OpenAI, MIT License.
- Fonts: Fraunces (The Fraunces Project Authors) and Karla (The Karla Project Authors), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Who runs Oikogen
Oikogen is run by an independent developer. There's no company behind it yet. Questions, ideas or corrections are welcome at support@oikogen.com.