Lignée — A Family Tree Built for Someone I Love (and Generations I'll Never Meet)

Description and use

Lignée is an open‑source web app that turns oral family stories into an editable mind‑map of kinship, powered by local AI and built with React Flow, Next.js, and SQLite.

Problem

Oral family histories in West African diaspora are fragile; elders die, notes are lost, and distant relatives lack a shared visual map of kinship.

Outcome

Lignée enables families to convert oral narratives into a structured, editable graph, preserving lineage across generations and locations while keeping data local and open.

Workflow

• Open the Lignée web app or PWA
• Tap a person to edit their card
• Paste or type a family story into the story import panel
• AI proposes nodes and edges based on the narrative
• Review and accept or correct the suggestions
• Save the updated tree
• Install the PWA on a phone for on‑the‑go access

Evidence

Lignée is an open‑source family tree that turns oral family stories into durable digital memory — with open‑source AI at the core, a mind‑map you can edit on your phone, and a promise that our kinship will not vanish when the last elder who remembers stops speaking.

Source

The app proposes nodes and edges on the tree. A human always reviews. AI suggests; the family decides.

Source

Open AI pipeline (designed for Ollama and local inference, with a local fallback) extracts candidate people, generations, and relationships.

Source