This began as a passion project. Family trees are usually charts of names, dates and boxes. The goal here was to bring the story alive instead: a journey you can fly through, with the places, the times, the music and the faces. It is also meant as a keepsake, a family heirloom: new records, photos and stories can easily be added as our families find them. And the same ideas and techniques could tell other families’ stories, or be used for other kinds of products.

My own goal was to explore what today’s AI tools can do with music, film, research and design. At work I use AI every day, but for engineering software.

What it’s made with: Claude (Claude Code) wrote and tested the site with me, and on the family version Claude answers questions. The facts come from family research in the records (birth and marriage records, ship lists, newspapers, gravestones) and a DNA test, each labelled with how sure we are. The globe is built with three.js, using satellite pictures (Sentinel-2) and height maps; the old photos are from Wikimedia Commons. The songs were made with Suno, and the films with Seedance, starting from still pictures. The site is hosted on Cloudflare.