For genealogists and family historians

Turn a GEDCOM file into a family tree timeline

Import the GEDCOM file from your genealogy program and see each ancestor as a life on a timeline, and the family as a tree, generation by generation. The timeline below follows the Darwins and the Wedgwoods from 1730 across more than two centuries.

From a GEDCOM file to a family tree

Import the file your genealogy program exports, and every person becomes an entity with a life on the timeline, along with the marriages, baptisms and burials the file holds.

  • Import all of the file or a single branch, up to 50,000 people.
  • Open the tree on any ancestor and read it generation by generation.
  • People and places you already have are matched, so you choose what to link and what is new.

Every fact traced to its source

Add a baptism register, a census record or a letter to your source library once, and cite it from every person, event and relation it supports.

  • Books, articles, archives, web pages and media, each with the right fields.
  • Formatted citations appear under every item that cites them, so a reader sees where each date comes from.
  • Give the timeline assistant a scanned page or a transcription and it drafts the events it finds, each with the quote it rests on. Nothing is added until you have reviewed it.

The world around an ancestor

Lay world history beneath your family's timeline, and see what else was going on in the years your ancestors lived.

  • Add up to three timelines beneath yours: your own, shared ones, or public ones.
  • Drag or zoom once and every strip moves with it.
  • The set lives in the link, so a relative who can open those timelines sees the same view.

Let the family suggest edits

Invite relatives as viewers, and they can suggest an edit: a corrected date, a new event or a removal, with a note. You decide what goes in.

  • A cousin suggests an edit and says where it comes from.
  • You tick what to accept and can leave a note for the suggester. Nothing is overwritten silently.
  • Accepted edits land as your own in the change history, and can be undone.

Pro & TeamLetting viewers suggest edits comes with Pro and Team.

Coming from a genealogy program or a spreadsheet?

A genealogy program holds the tree. It doesn't show when your ancestors' lives overlapped, or what the world was doing around them. Import its GEDCOM file and the lives fall on one axis.

A spreadsheet of names and dates has no way to say a date is only "around 1830". An uncertain date here keeps its margin, and the axis shows it.

A folder of scans keeps the sources apart from the facts. Here a citation sits under the item it supports.

More lives and families

Explore all

Ask AI

Answers come from the help centre and can be wrong.

Timescrolly does NOT keep your conversations.

Open the family tree

The Darwins and the Wedgwoods, imported from a GEDCOM file, with every life on the timeline and a tree to switch to.

Open The Darwins and the Wedgwoods