How to manage a Circle

1. Home screen

When you land on this page with no file open, you’ll see two options:

• Create file → generates a new, empty file, ready for adding Circles and people.
• View Circles / Open file → opens a .fam file (or a .json/.txt file received from someone else — see the Sharing section) that you already have saved on your computer.

2. The main interface

Once a file is opened or created, the screen is organized as follows:

• Top bar: the current file name, and the Save, Save as, Open file, Import tree and Share Circle buttons.
• Left panel: the list of Circles, the person in charge/successor of the current Circle, and the list of people with a search box.
• Central area: the family tree (in any of its three views) or the sorted list, together with the Circle’s toolbar (Configure Circle, Export to PDF, Center, and the view selector).

Selecting a person (by clicking their box or in the panel list) brings up a card with their details just below the tree.

3. Collapsing the side panel

On a computer, if you need more screen space for the tree, you can collapse the left panel with the small arrow tab fixed to the left edge of the screen, centered vertically. Once collapsed, the tree takes up the full available width; the arrow reverses direction to show you can expand it again. Because it’s fixed to the screen (not to the content), it always stays in view even if you scroll down a very tall tree, and it never covers any text. The app remembers whether you left it collapsed the next time you open it.

4. Managing several Circles

A single .fam file can contain several Circles (for example, different branches or families). In the left panel:

• Press the + button next to “Circles” to create a new one.
• Click any Circle in the list to select it and work with it — the tree, the list of people, and the person in charge/successor shown always correspond to the selected Circle.
• From “Configure Circle” you can rename it or delete it.

5. Adding, editing and deleting people

Press the + button next to “People”, the ⬇+ icon (“Add child”) on a box, or the ✎ icon (“Edit”) to open the form. The fields are organized in this order, designed to be filled in naturally:

Deleting a person

There are two ways to delete a person: from the edit form itself, or more quickly with the 🗑 icon that appears when you hover over their box in the tree, next to the view, add child and edit icons. In both cases you’re asked to confirm before deleting, and their family relationships and any associated responsibility/succession are removed as well.

6. The three photographs of each person

Each person can have up to three photographs, one for each stage of life: childhood, adulthood and most recent. All three are optional and independent of one another.

In the “Tree with photos” view, hovering over a person’s box changes the photo shown depending on which horizontal third the cursor points to: the left shows the childhood photo, the center the adulthood one, and the right the most recent one. If a given stage has no photo, the nearest available stage is shown automatically. When you move the mouse away, the most recent available photo is shown again — which is also the only one that appears in the PDF export and in person cards, since no interaction is possible there.

7. Marriages and partners

In addition to father and mother, you can register a person’s spouse or partner, whether or not they have children together. In the tree, partners are always shown side by side, joined by two rings (visible in the screenshots in the previous sections).

8. Person in Charge and Successor

Each Circle can have a person designated as Current Person in Charge and, optionally, a Designated Successor. These are assigned from the person’s own form, and are shown in the side panel and in the tree with a distinctive green border on their box.

9. The three tree views

The toolbar selector lets you switch between:

• Tree with photos — boxes with each person’s photograph (see the photographs section).
• Tree with names — more compact boxes, with just the name and basic details.
• Sorted list — see the corresponding section.

In both tree modes, each box shows the birth date (if known) and, if the person has died, the date of death. Deceased people are automatically highlighted with a golden aura, so you can tell at a glance who is still alive:

Example of a deceased person’s box

The group of three buttons next to the view selector lets you control the zoom — see the next section.

10. Zooming the tree

Next to “Configure Circle” and “Export to PDF” there’s a group of three buttons to control the tree’s zoom:

• − zooms out, to see more people at once (smaller).
• ▭ centers the tree and, in doing so, also resets the zoom to its original level (100%).
• + zooms in, to see more detail.

On mobile, you can also pinch with two fingers directly on the tree to zoom in or out — the gesture only affects the tree, not the rest of the page.

11. Marking someone as recovered

Fits with the very spirit of the Occasio Initiative: once a deceased person has been “recovered”, you can mark it from the Sorted list, with the checkbox that appears to the left of their name (only available for deceased people). When you check it:

• The date of that moment is recorded automatically — there’s nothing to type in by hand, and this data does not appear on the person’s form.
• Their entire row in the list switches to the same gold color the tree uses for deceased people.
• Their box in the family tree stops showing that gold color, and instead shows the note “✨ recovered” (masculine or feminine form, according to their sex) along with the date.

It can be unmarked at any time, restoring the gold color to its original place in the tree.

12. Isolating a branch

In large trees, it can be useful to focus on a single family branch. People who have a partner or descendants show a small checkbox (☐) in the top-left corner of their box; checking it filters the tree to show only that person’s direct ancestry, their partner, and their shared descendants, temporarily hiding the rest. A notice appears with a button to return to the full tree whenever you need to.

If, while in this mode, someone in the visible branch has a spouse whose own ancestry is not shown, a small “preview” box appears (semi-transparent, offset down and to the right) indicating that relationship; hovering over it shows it in full.

13. The sorted list view

Shows every person in the Circle in a table, with these controls:

• Sort by date of death, ascending or descending.
• Filter with three buttons: All, Living and Deceased.
• Rows are colored automatically (green for living people, purple for deceased, and gold for those marked as recovered), even without applying the filter.
• A “Recovery” column with the corresponding date, for anyone who is marked — see the previous section.

14. Saving, opening and exporting to PDF

Saving and opening

• Save — downloads the current file under the same name.
• Save as — lets you choose a new name for the .fam file.
• Open file — opens an existing .fam (or .json/.txt) file, replacing the one you have open.

Exporting to PDF

The Export to PDF button opens a dialog with these options:

• What to export: the tree’s graphic layout (with or without photographs), or the full list of people with all their data.
• Include photographs — only applies to the graphic layout.
• Print Circle cover pages — adds two pages at the front of the document with the Occasio Initiative cover and manifesto, automatically substituting the names of the Circle’s person in charge and successor.

The browser’s print window opens; choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. If the tree is very large, the graphic layout is automatically split across several pages by family branch.

15. Sharing a Circle

The Share Circle button shares only the Circle you currently have selected (not the whole file), and offers two ways to do so:

Share via WhatsApp

Downloads a special (.html) file which, when attached and sent via WhatsApp, opens automatically with the Circle loaded as soon as the recipient taps it — with no need to select any file manually.

Generate link

Creates a link that loads the Circle directly when opened. If the resulting link would be too long to send reliably, the app warns you before generating it and suggests alternatives (such as not including photographs).

In both cases you can choose whether to include the photographs at original quality, as thumbnails (recommended, lighter), or not include them at all.

16. Importing someone else’s tree

Designed for when someone else is collaborating on the genealogical research — for example, a relative who completes their own branch and sends you back the file. The Import tree button, next to “Open file”, opens a different .fam file and lets you choose which people to bring into your current Circle, without replacing or modifying your file.

How it works

1. The app automatically compares that file with your own. If it detects people in common, it goes straight to the selection step.
2. If it finds no one in common (completely independent files), it asks you to manually point out one person who is the same in both, so it can connect the rest.
3. Visual selection: the imported file’s tree is displayed. People you already have appear dimmed and marked with a ✓; for new ones, check the box for those you’re interested in — or use the “+ branch” button to bring in their entire descendance at once.
4. Final review: if any selected person would end up “hanging” (their father, mother, or connecting partner wasn’t included), the app offers to automatically bring in that chain as well. If any person you already had shows different data in the imported file, a field-by-field comparison is shown so you can choose which to keep — by default, your own data is always kept.

17. Practical tips

• Save often; the unsaved-changes indicator appears next to the file name.
• You can have several Circles within the same .fam file.
• All the work is done locally: once the page has loaded, you can carry on without an internet connection.
• Make periodic backups of your .fam files. Since they are local files, keeping them safe is your responsibility.