صلة الرحم ṣilat ar-raḥim
Everyone you’re related to, and exactly how.
Kinscroll is a family register you keep yourself. Write the people down and it works out the rest: how each one reaches you, in words; who is maḥram; which houses your family married into; how the whole thing grew, decade by decade.
It runs in your browser. It works offline. It needs no account, and nothing you type leaves this device unless you ask it to.
Free. Already have a tree somewhere else? Import its GEDCOM and carry on.
A sample register — five houses, six generations, 84 people.
Point at any dot to light the road from “you” to that person.
- man
- woman
- unrecorded
- married in
- size — descendants
- a marriage
- parent to child
- the house she was born in
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Offline, first and always
The register lives in this browser. Kinscroll opens and works with no network, no server and no sign-in — on a plane, in a village, on a laptop you never connect.
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An account is optional
Make one only if you want backup, sync across your devices, and sharing. The account is free. Everything the app does works without it.
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GEDCOM, both directions
Import the file your old tree exports. Export GEDCOM 5.5.1 back out whenever you like, and open it in Ancestry, Gramps or FamilySearch. No lock-in.
the register, seven ways
One family. Seven ways to read it.
Same register, different questions. Each view is one keystroke away, because the fastest thing on any screen is the keyboard.
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Cards
The tree as cards, generation by generation — name, years, house, and every tie drawn between them. This is the one you edit in.
y toggles
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Constellation
Every person a dot, sized by how many descend from them, grouped into houses. The whole register on one screen, however big it gets.
y
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Raḥim circles
One person at the centre, their kin laid out by closeness — nearest first. Each band says in plain words how it reaches them, and marks who is maḥram.
r
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Ties
Every house as a circle, every marriage between two houses as a line between them. Click a line and it lists the couples who made it.
w
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Marriages
The ledger of every union: the two people, the two houses, the children. Marriages within the family are listed first, with how the couple already related.
k
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Story
The register in numbers — how each generation grew, how long people lived, the largest houses, how often the family married within itself.
v
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Chronicle
Every dated birth and passing, decade by decade, so the family arrives in order instead of all at once.
T
Add a person with a, a child with c, undo with u, find anyone with /. Press ? in the app for the whole list.
the reason it exists
The question no other family app answers.
Most genealogy software is about the dead: find a record, extend a line, admire the pedigree. Kinscroll is about the living — the people you owe ties to, and what those ties actually are.
Pick anyone in the register. Kinscroll puts them at the centre and lays their kin out by closeness, nearest first — al-aqrab fa-l-aqrab. Each person carries the words for how they reach the centre: your mother’s brother’s daughter, not “third-degree relative”. Each band says whether it is maḥram. In-laws are shown as aṣhār and kept separate, because the duty runs through blood.
Kinscroll shows what your register implies and cites where the rule comes from. It does not issue rulings, and where a case is disputed it says so rather than picking a side.
Whoever loves that he be granted more wealth and that his lease of life be prolonged, then he should keep good relations with his kith and kin.
None of this is a wall. Six of the seven views are ordinary family-tree views, and any family — Muslim or not — can use the whole thing and never open the raḥim page.
what leaves this device
A register of your relatives is not our business model.
Your family is real people, most of them alive, most of whom never agreed to be in a database. So here is the whole data flow, in three columns, with nothing behind a “learn more”.
Stays here
- The register itself — names, dates, relationships, notes, sources. Held in this browser’s local storage under a single key.
- Everything you do with it — panning, selecting, editing, undoing. There is nothing to send, because there is no server in the loop.
- Your settings — theme, accent, which view you had open, who you set as “home”.
Leaves only when you ask
- Backup and sync — only after you create an account and switch sync on. Your register is copied to your account so your other devices can read it.
- A share link — only the branch you choose, only to whoever you send the link to, and you can revoke it. Everything else stays private.
- A file you export — a GEDCOM or a JSON backup, saved where you put it. That file is yours and works without us.
Never
- No tracking, and nothing that recognises you later. No cookie, no advert, no profile, no third-party script. This page — never the register — counts visits with a request we send ourselves: the page you are on, and nothing that says who you are. No address is kept, so we cannot tell you what country you read this in. Switch on Do Not Track and it does not fire at all. This page also fetches its typefaces from Google Fonts; those two are every request it makes to anyone.
- No matching, no DNA, no “we found a relative” mail. Your relatives are not leads. They are not sold, shared, or shown to other users.
- No hostage-taking. Delete your account and the server copy goes with it — the copy in your browser stays yours, and export never stops working.
any family, anywhere
Names spelled the way your family spells them.
Most family-tree software assumes a first name, a middle name and a surname you inherit from your father. Most of the world does not work like that. Kinscroll treats the naming convention as part of the record, not as a formatting accident.
| Written | Convention | How Kinscroll reads it |
|---|---|---|
| يوسف بن عمرYusuf bin Umar | nasab — bin / bint | Given name, then father. Written right to left; the romanisation is kept beside it, not instead of it. |
| María García Fernández | two family names | Her father’s house, then her mother’s. Neither one is a middle name. |
| Guðrún Jónsdóttir | patronymic — dóttir / son | The second name is her father’s, not a family name, and her brother’s differs. |
| Kim Min-jun | family first | Family name leads. Kinscroll does not reverse it to look Western. |
| Suharto | mononym | One name is a whole name. No blank surname field, no “(unknown)”. |
- Also handled: ibn and abu, Slavic ovich / ovna, Ethiopian and Icelandic patronymics, matronymics, honorifics kept out of the sort key, and multiple scripts in one register.
- Right-to-left is laid out, not mirrored by accident. Arabic in the same tree as Latin keeps its own direction and its own optical size.
- Nothing is transliterated behind your back. If you write a name in one script and its romanisation in another, the register keeps both and shows the one you chose.
before you start
Questions worth asking first.
Do I need an account?
No. Open Kinscroll and start typing. Every view, every import and export, and the whole register work with no account and no network. An account exists only to back the register up, sync it to your other devices, and share a branch.
Where exactly is my data?
In this browser, on this device, in local storage under one key. Not in a cloud, not in a cache we control, not in an analytics pipeline. If you open Kinscroll in a different browser, the register is not there — because it never left the first one.
What if I clear my browser data?
Then the register goes with it. That is the honest cost of local-first, so Kinscroll makes the two answers easy: export a JSON or GEDCOM backup any time with one key, or turn on an account and let it keep a copy for you. Do one of them before your register gets big.
Can I bring in the tree I already have?
Yes, if that tool can export GEDCOM — Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, Gramps and most others can. Kinscroll imports it, keeps the source label on every imported person so you can tell them from your own entries, and exports GEDCOM 5.5.1 back out whenever you want to leave.
Is it free? What is the catch?
The app is free and always will be — it is one file that runs in your browser, so there is nothing to meter. The optional account for backup, sync and sharing is free too. If a paid tier ever appears it will be for hosting-shaped things; the offline register and the export button are not going behind a price.
Do I have to be Muslim to use it?
No. Kinscroll is built around ṣilat ar-raḥim — keeping the ties of kinship — and that shows in one of its seven views and in the naming defaults. The other six are ordinary family-tree views. Change the naming convention, skip the raḥim page, and it is simply a fast, private register.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, and offline once it has loaded. The tree pans and zooms with the usual gestures. Editing a large register is more comfortable with a keyboard, which is true of every tool that does this.
Can I share part of the tree without publishing my family?
Yes. You pick a branch and Kinscroll writes out a copy — one HTML file holding the whole app and only that branch — which you send to the people you meant to send it to. Nothing is listed, indexed or searchable, and nothing of yours is on a server. It is a file, so send it the way you would send a photograph: once it is out of your hands you cannot take it back. Today that copy is cut from the command line, not from a button in the app.
Start with yourself and two parents.
That is enough for Kinscroll to have something to say. The rest arrives one relative at a time, in whatever order you remember them.