AP Family Research

AP Family Research is a private workbench for the part of family history that comes before the conclusion: unfiled certificates and photos, years of spreadsheets, notebook pages, conjectures, brick walls and the searches that found nothing. Capture it quickly, organise it around the questions you are trying to answer, keep an honest research log, and promote a proven conclusion into your family tree with its evidence attached.

Private by definition. There are no public pages, shortcodes, blocks or other front-end output, and every screen is for administrators. Your research stays in your own database and media library; nothing reaches your tree unless you promote it.

Free features

No cap on what you record and no time limit.

• Capture – phone camera, single or bulk upload, and an inbox to file or discard items later. Nothing is required at capture, and related files (such as the front and back of a photo) can be kept as one item.
• Spreadsheet import – map CSV columns to artefact fields; every row becomes an artefact.
• Artefact store – types, tags, search and links to people in your tree. Transcriptions are stored exactly as typed, separate from your comments, with optional Mills evidence fields.
• Research questions – questions, conjectures and brick walls, with your reasoning, a plan, and evidence for, against or neutral.
• Research log – when and where you searched, what you sought and what came of it. Negative results are first-class entries, and repeating a search warns you.
• Tasks by repository – to-do lists grouped by place, including plan steps.
• Promotion – turn a proven conclusion into a fact on a person in your tree, with the chosen artefacts attached as media and cited as sources.
• Full export – one .tar archive with every table as CSV, every original file with a readable description, a dossier per question and a note for whoever inherits your research.

Pro edition

A separate edition sold at ancestorpress.com and installed in place of this plugin; its code is not in this package. It adds AI transcription, extraction with link suggestions, question analysis and classification; duplicate detection with merges you approve; natural-language search; a brick-wall board, a research timeline and a printable dossier. The AI features use your own WordPress AI connector (WordPress 7.0 or later) at your own cost, and ask for consent before sending anything linked to a living person.

More from AncestorPress

AP Family Research is one of a small family of AncestorPress tools for family history research. Each works on its own, all are free on WordPress.org, and they share one data core – so a conclusion you promote here appears in the others with no re-import:

• AP Family Trees – beautiful, interactive family tree charts and member profiles on any page. This is where a promoted conclusion shows up, with its citation attached.
• AP Family Archive – publish your family history as a complete website: a person page for every ancestor, family group pages, a surname index and full search, with living people protected automatically.
• AP One-Name Studies – give a one-name study a home on your own site: surname variants and deviants, a searchable occurrence index, and historic-county distribution maps.
• AP One-Place Studies – give a one-place study a home on your own site: the records of a parish, village, street or house as a searchable occurrence index, place and household pages, and full export.

Linking people and promoting conclusions need a family tree in that shared data, for example one imported with AP Family Trees. Everything else here works on its own.

Third-party libraries

• php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson – MIT, bundled with the shared AncestorPress core.
• Freemius WordPress SDK – GPLv3; release 2.13.4 with a small local PHP 8 fix.

External services

Freemius

Purpose: optional account connection, licence administration, checkout and usage diagnostics, provided by Freemius, Inc. This plugin never downloads or installs the Pro edition; its updates come from WordPress.org.

When: only if you opt in, connect or manage an account or licence, use checkout, or consent to diagnostics. If you skip the opt-in, every workbench feature still works.

Data: the site URL, the administrator email you provide, plugin and WordPress versions and licence identifiers; usage diagnostics only with consent. No research is ever sent.

Terms: https://freemius.com/terms/
Privacy: https://freemius.com/privacy/

AncestorPress Support Service

Purpose: answers questions about using the plugin through the optional Help assistant, the AncestorPress Support Copilot, provided by Black and White Trading Ltd through the AncestorPress Support Service. The assistant is read-only.

When: nothing is sent until the site is connected (through the Freemius opt-in or a support token on the Support tab) and an administrator opens the assistant and accepts its privacy notice. The acceptance is recorded with who gave it and when, and can be withdrawn on the Support tab.

Data with each question: the question and up to 20 recent chat messages; the site address and any Freemius installation ID or support token, to authorise the request; this plugin’s version, the core library version, the versions of other active plugins whose folders begin “ap-” or “ancp-“, the admin screen, the database schema revision, whether AI features are present and configured, and counts of artefacts, questions, log entries and tasks – never their contents. The free plan answers a limited number of questions a month. With Pro and your own AI provider, questions go to that provider instead and the service is asked only for documentation, unless the local answer fails.

Tickets: with a licence or support token, only when you open the ticket form and click “Create ticket” does the plugin also send the conversation, the details above, the question category, the contact email you enter (pre-filled with your WordPress account email) and the first and last name from your WordPress profile; these are kept as a support ticket. On the free plan no ticket form is offered, so none of this is sent, and help from a person is on the WordPress.org support forum.

Retention: questions are not stored, and the conversation stays in your browser until you leave the page. Authorisation checks are cached for up to 12 hours; rate-limit and free-plan counters are kept against a hash of your host name (monthly counts for about 40 days); daily usage counters with no site identifier are kept for up to 180 days. Please avoid pasting transcriptions or details of living relatives into a question.

Terms: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/