Skip to content
Draw My Tree docs

Stories, photos, and events

A name and a date is a start, but the people in your tree had lives. Draw My Tree gives each person four places to capture more.

Stories

Every person has a Story: an open-ended biography written in Markdown. Select the person, then switch to the Story tab at the top of the side panel (the other tab, Person, holds the details, photos, and records below).

The editor supports the basics: headings, bold, italic, and underline, bulleted and numbered lists, blockquotes, and links. If you've used a Markdown-aware app before (Notion, GitHub, Obsidian), it'll feel familiar. If you haven't, just type; formatting buttons in the toolbar handle the syntax for you.

A good story is whatever helps you remember. Some patterns that work well:

  • A short paragraph at the top with the one-sentence summary ("Emigrated from Cork in 1872, settled in Boston, ran a grocery on Tremont Street until 1908.")
  • A "Sources" section at the bottom listing where each fact came from: census years, headstones, family lore.
  • Inline questions like "Need to confirm birth year; death certificate says 1844 but census says 1846." You'll thank yourself later.

Stories save when you press Save. The "Unsaved changes" indicator at the top of the panel tells you whether you've drifted from the saved version.

Inline citations

You can anchor any sentence in the story to a record on the same person. While editing, the Cite a record panel under the editor lists every photo and record attached to the person, numbered [1], [2], [3]… in the order they appear on the details panel. Click an entry to insert a citation at the cursor; readers see a small [N] superscript in your prose that scrolls them to that record card when clicked.

The on-disk syntax is a regular Markdown link with the cite: scheme:

Born in Plattsburgh on Aug 4, 2007 [obit](cite:MEDIA_ID).

MEDIA_ID must be a photo or record already attached to the same person; the app refuses to save a story that cites anything else, so a citation can never point nowhere. The Cite a record picker only offers records that are attached, so the citations you insert always resolve. If you delete a cited record, edit the story to remove the leftover marker before saving.

Photos and videos

The Photos & videos section of the person's details panel is for visual media: photos, formal portraits, and short videos. If you can edit the tree you can either Upload a file directly (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, MP4, WebM, or QuickTime; up to 25 MB for images, 250 MB for video) or From URL to paste a link to an existing file. Uploaded files are stored privately and served back via short-lived signed URLs.

Each item has a type (photo / portrait / video), a short title that appears as the item's display name, an optional longer caption for descriptive context, and a source for attribution. If you omit the title the record falls back to the type name.

Profile picture

The avatar at the top of the panel shows which image renders on the person's card on the canvas. If you can edit the tree, click the avatar to open a thumbnail picker of every photo or portrait attached to the person; click a thumb to make it the profile pic. Clear profile picture removes the designation. Videos and documents are never offered as profile candidates.

Records

The Records section is for anything that documents the person, distinct from the open-ended Story biography. If you can edit the tree you can add four kinds of record:

  • Events: dated facts (marriage, divorce, census, burial, immigration, newspaper, probate, property, church, occupation, residence, and record). Each has a date, place, short summary, and an optional source URL.
  • Document: link to a PDF or scan held elsewhere (archive site, Google Drive, etc.).
  • Link: a generic external URL (a Wikipedia article, a blog post, a YouTube clip).
  • Text: inline prose for poems, transcripts, oral-history recollections (anything you'd rather keep on the person than in a separate file).

Events that attach to a relationship (marriage, divorce) show up in the Records section of both partners. Pencil and trash icons next to each event let you edit or remove it in edit mode.