How to build a family wiki with MyBloodlines?

A family wiki is exactly what it sounds like: an interlinked, browsable, searchable record of who your family is and what happened to them, where every page connects to the related pages. People often try to build one in an actual wiki tool and give up, because a general wiki makes you create and maintain every link by hand, and enforce every privacy rule yourself. MyBloodlines is, in effect, a family wiki with the tedious parts already handled — the links between people are structural, and privacy is automatic. Here’s how to build yours.

What is a family wiki?

A family wiki is a private, collaborative reference for your family — a set of interlinked pages, one per person, story, and photo, that anyone in the family can browse, search, and add to over time. The word “wiki” is the important part: like any wiki, it’s built from many small contributions and cross-linked so you can click from one page to every related one, rather than reading it start to finish.

It helps to define it against the two things it isn’t:

  • Not a static family tree. A tree is a chart of names and dates — it shows that people are connected, but it’s not a place to read about them. A family wiki adds the substance: the stories, the personalities, the photographs, all linked to the people they concern.
  • Not a one-time memoir book. A printed memoir or compiled book is finished the day it’s printed; you can’t click through it, and adding to it means starting over. A family wiki has no endpoint — it keeps growing as relatives contribute, which is what makes it a living archive.

In other words, a family wiki sits exactly where most families actually want to be: richer than a tree, more durable and collaborative than a book. It’s one of the core pieces of how to preserve your family history, and building one is the practical version of that goal.

What makes it a wiki, not just a tree

In a plain family tree, a person is a node with a name and some dates. In a wiki, a person is a page that links out to everything connected to them. MyBloodlines works the second way. Every person, every story, and every photo is its own entry, and they link to each other automatically:

  • Open a person and you see their details plus every story and photo they appear in.
  • Open a story and you see the full account plus everyone involved, each linking back to their own page.
  • Open a photo and you see who’s in it and which stories reference it.

Nothing dead-ends, and you never draw those links by hand — they exist because you recorded who’s related to whom and who was part of what. The reasoning behind that interlinking is in people, stories, photos: one interlinked archive.

Step 1: Claim your profile and start the graph

Everything begins with claiming your own profile — the entry point that ties your access to your place in the graph. From there you add the people: your parents, grandparents, children, siblings. You only ever record parent-child links; MyBloodlines derives the rest (siblings, cousins, in-laws) automatically, so your wiki’s “who is related to whom” stays consistent without manual upkeep. The getting-started walkthrough is in how to claim your profile and start recording, and the reason only parent-child links are entered is in why MyBloodlines only records parent-child ties.

A tree of names isn’t a wiki yet — the articles are what make it one. Write a story the way you’d tell it: how your grandparents met, the year the family emigrated, the origin of a nickname. As you record it, link everyone who was actually part of it. That single act wires the story into every one of those people’s pages at once. A practical walkthrough is in how to write a family story and link everyone in it.

Step 3: Attach photos to their stories and people

Add the photographs and connect each one to the story it belongs to and the people pictured in it. Now the loop is complete: a person leads to a story, the story leads to a photo, the photo leads to another person — the click-through browsing that makes a wiki worth having.

With people, stories, and photos connected, your wiki is usable in the two ways a wiki should be. You browse by following links from page to page, and you search — global search returns any person or story matching a name or a few words, instantly, within the part of the graph you’re allowed to see. Years from now, someone can start anywhere and find their way to anything.

A wiki that stays private and shared at once

Two things separate this from a wiki you’d build in general-purpose software. First, it’s collaborative without an owner: any relative can contribute to their part of the same shared record, so the wiki isn’t one person’s project to maintain — this is the whole category of private, collaborative family history apps, and MyBloodlines is one of them. Second, it’s private automatically. There’s no public URL to lock down and no permissions matrix to hand-manage; each person only ever sees the part of the graph within their permission boundary. Unlike a public worldwide tree, nothing here is findable by a stranger — the wider comparison is in how to keep your family tree private. You get the browsable, searchable, interlinked wiki without the two chores — link maintenance and privacy administration — that usually make building one by hand not worth it.

Common questions

Do I need to be technical to build a family wiki?

No. The reason general-purpose wiki software defeats most families is the manual link-building and privacy administration. In MyBloodlines those are handled for you — you record people, stories, and photos, and the links and privacy rules are structural rather than something you configure.

How is a family wiki different from a family tree?

A family tree is a chart of names and relationships; a family wiki adds the substance — stories, personalities, and photos — and links everything together so you can click from a person to their stories to the people in them. The tree shows connections; the wiki lets you read about them.

Can a family wiki stay private?

Yes. In MyBloodlines there’s no public URL and no directory; each person sees only the part of the graph within their permission boundary, so the wiki is private by architecture rather than by a setting you have to manage.

Start recording your bloodline Claim your profile and begin at MyBloodlines →