One person in your family is doing all of this.
The family tree your family keeps.
Relatives maintain their own branches — linked, not copied. Privacy for the living is built into the record rather than bolted onto the export.
Two things nothing else does
Merge the trees you already have. Then undo it.
Most researchers own three or four overlapping trees and dare not combine them, because every existing merge is one-way and unreviewable.
Kinkeep shows you every person it believes appears in both, and merges nothing until you have said so. Where two trees disagree, both claims are kept — you choose which to show, and the other stays on the record. Each person remembers which tree they came from, permanently. One action undoes all of it.
Splitting is the same machinery in reverse. Hand your cousin her side of the family and it stays joined to yours at the boundary.
Link a cousin's branch instead of copying it.
A copied branch is out of date the moment it is made. A linked one is not a copy: your cousin keeps ownership and keeps working in her own tree, and you see it as it stands today.
Either of you can end the link. Ending it removes the branch, including anything cached — revocable means revoked.
Nobody has to give up their tree to work together.
Living people
No living person is ever public. Not by default, not by setting, not by export, not on any plan. There is no configuration that changes this.
Visibility is worked out when someone asks to see a record, not stored on it. Five rules apply in order — the law where the tree is kept, the tree's own policy, anything set on that individual, what the person themselves has agreed to, and what the viewer has been granted — and each can only narrow what the one before it allowed. A new feature cannot widen access by accident, because nothing in the model is able to.
A living person appears in a shared link as a position in the tree, with no name and no dates, so the shape of the family survives without the person being named. Someone who asks not to be in your tree is removed from every export and every link, with no override available to you.
What this is not
- No DNA.
- No genetic data stored, matched or interpreted. Permanent.
- No record subscription.
- We cite and link to census, BMD and newspaper sources. We do not host them or charge you to search them.
- No social network.
- No feed, no follows, no public profiles, no streaks or badges. A family is not a completion percentage.
- No single global tree.
- There is no one true record of a human being that strangers can edit.
Why this exists
You don't know your cousin's side. Your aunt does.
She is not going to learn genealogy software, and you are not going to keep re-typing what she emails you.
Your cousin keeps a tree too.
On another platform, in another file, separately maintaining the same great-grandparents. Every exchange of files makes one more stale copy that starts diverging immediately.
Half your tree is living people.
Most tools treat that as a checkbox bolted onto a data model that assumes everything is public record. Names, dates and photographs of living people leak through exports, shared links and search.
Where this is up to
Kinkeep is in development and open to early users. It is worth being exact about what that means, because parts of what is described above are still being built.
Working now
- Import GEDCOM from Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch, including the zip they hand you.
- Merge trees with a full preview, and undo the whole thing in one action.
- Split a branch out without severing it from yours.
- Charts, timelines, search and a relationship calculator.
- Export to GEDCOM or JSON, with a counted report of what the format cannot carry.
- The privacy model below, applied on every read.
Not yet built
- Stewardship — hand a relative one branch to maintain.
- Linked branches — show a cousin’s side live, in their ownership.
- Interviews — five questions to a relative who will never make an account.
- Succession — the tree outliving the person who kept it.
Your data is yours to leave with. Export to GEDCOM or JSON at any time, and the export reports in counts what the format could not carry rather than disclaiming that some things may be lost.
Start with the file you already have
Drop in a GEDCOM and Kinkeep reads it and shows you what is in it — how many people, how many documents, and any lines it could not read — before you are asked for an email address, and before anything is saved.