About Family Roots Center
Built and maintained by Micah Boswell
Family Roots Center is a place to build a family tree, keep the records straight, and hold on to the stories that usually go missing within two generations. It handles GEDCOM import, two-parent lineage, photographs, documents and written remembrance, and it redacts living people from public trees by default.
Who builds it
Micah Boswell is an experience design leader based in Dallas, Texas, with thirty years in product and user experience design. He has spent that career making complicated systems legible to the people who have to use them.
He built this one for a specific reason. Genealogy software is mostly built for researchers, and it shows: dense, unforgiving, and indifferent to the fact that most people come to it because someone died and they realised nobody wrote anything down. Family Roots Center is an attempt at the same rigour with a gentler front door.
The Boswell and Lester lines behind much of the test data are his own, traced back through Virginia and a Romanichal family of horse traders and tinkerers who were pressed into indenture on tobacco plantations and later converted in the Southern revivals. Researching them is what surfaced most of the features here.
His other work
- conscious-shell.com — portfolio and writing, thirty years of design work
- Pen & Paper — fountain pens, inks and paper, catalogued and cross-referenced
- GP Sailing — an independent SailGP fan site
- github.com/socraticstatic — the code, including this site
Contact
Questions, corrections, or a record that looks wrong: micah@conscious-shell.com. Removal requests are handled on the privacy page.