Overview
Tovihouande Genealogy is a family-history application designed to preserve what usually disappears: relationships, photographs, profiles, and records across generations of one family. Membership is controlled, and the entire product is designed around the privacy of the people in it. The public site is not yet launched.
Problem
Most families have no durable record of themselves. Photos sit on individual phones, relationships live only in elders' memories, and each generation knows a little less than the one before. Commercial genealogy platforms are built for research into the past, not for a living family maintaining its own present.
Users
- Family members maintaining their own profiles
- Family administrators managing membership and records
- Relatives registering births and life events
Goals
- Model real family relationships, not just a static tree
- Give every member a profile and a place for photographs
- Support registration of new family members and key events
- Keep the entire archive private and membership-controlled
My role
Founder and developer — data modeling for family relationships, membership and access design, and application development.
Product strategy
The product optimizes for longevity over features: a family archive is only valuable if it is still maintained in twenty years, so simplicity of contribution — adding a photo, registering a birth — takes priority over genealogical power tools.
Key features
- Relationship & family-tree modeling
- Family members, generations, and relationships modeled as structured data rather than free text.
- Member profiles & photographs
- Every member has a profile with photos and biographical details maintained by the family itself.
- New-arrival registration
- Births and new members are registered into the family record as they happen.
- Controlled membership
- Access is limited to verified family members, with administrative control over who joins.
Technical architecture
- Graph-like relational modeling of people and relationships
- Membership, authentication, and role-based administration
- Photo and record storage designed for private access only
- Cloud deployment planned behind the family domain
Security & privacy
- Private by default — no public profiles or discoverable member data
- Membership verification before any access is granted
- Personal family information never used in demos or portfolio materials
Engineering challenges & decisions
Modeling real-world family structures that don't fit a simple tree.
Relationships are first-class records between people, which accommodates the complexity real families have.
Lessons learned
- Privacy-first products invert normal growth thinking: the goal is the right hundred users, not the next million.
- Data models for people and relationships deserve more design time than any screen.
Future improvements
- Timeline views of family history
- Document and record digitization workflows