I decided to do it: turn a huge hand-drawn family tree into a little app people can look at and search. The source material is a chart made for an earlier family party, some years back.
The chart is drawn by hand on one very large sheet of paper, and it's complicated: lots of branches, partners and generations, with lines running a long way across the page. It's a great object to stand in front of, but it's hard to find one person on it, and it only exists in one place.
The goal was simple: make it something people can look at on their phones and search by name.
Nothing on the paper exists as data, so the first job is turning it into data. I photographed the chart in sections, then read the names, birth years and relationships out of the photos into a single file: one entry per person, linked to their parents and partners. Some of the photos came out dark and blurry, so anything I could only half read is flagged on the page as possibly wrong.
Handwriting and long-range lines are where mistakes creep in, so the transcription gets checked against the original one section at a time before anything is published.
The site itself is a single page. You can pan and zoom around the tree, search for a name and jump straight to that person, and click anyone to see their details and who they're connected to. Since the site is public, living relatives are shown by name only, with no dates.
It's a page on this site, built in Astro like the rest of it. The whole tree lives in one JSON file, and a small script in the browser handles the search and navigation. There's no server or database, so it stays fast and there's nothing to look after.