Shijro is a free family tree app built by the whole family, not one person. Invite your relatives, and everyone adds the names, dates, photos and stories they know to one shared family tree, kept private to your family.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
- Make a family tree that is drawn, not listed. Generations are laid out with couples side by side. Pan and pinch, focus on one person's ancestors or descendants, and reveal branches as you go.
- Build it together. Invite relatives with a link: send it to the family WhatsApp group, or show a QR code to someone in the room. Choose whether each relative can help build the family tree or only look. The aunt who knows the year and the cousin who has the photo each add their part.
- See how any two people are related. Tap two relatives and Shijro names the link: grandmother, second cousin, great-great-granddaughter, mother-in-law.
- Keep family photos together, with everyone tagged. Photos belong to the whole family: add a wedding, an Eid gathering or an old school photo once, tag who is in it, and it appears on each of their pages. Open a photo full screen, zoom in on faces and swipe through the album.
- Write down what each photo is. Anyone in the family can add a caption, a note and the year it was taken, and the family album groups itself by decade.
- Give every person a page. Name, dates, biography, photos and documents. Dates can be exact, a year or unknown, because family memory is rarely complete. Frame their profile and cover photo so the right face shows everywhere.
- Remember those who have died. Record the date, or just that they did when nobody remembers it, and where they rest: the cemetery, a map pin for the grave and a photo of the headstone.
- Keep a shajra-e-nasab the way it was meant to be read. Names in Urdu are set in proper Nastaliq, and Arabic names in a proper Arabic face, not whatever your phone falls back to.
- Never lose anything by accident. Anything deleted waits 30 days in Recently deleted, and biographies keep their earlier versions.
- Find anyone fast. Everyone in the family, grouped by decade of birth, with search.
- Explore a real family tree first. Browse the British royal family, eight generations from Queen Victoria onwards with their portraits and paintings, before you sign up.
- Tell us what is wrong or what you want. Report a bug, suggest a feature or flag a person or photo that should not be there, straight from the app.
PRIVATE BY DEFAULT
Your family tree is visible only to the people you invite. Shijro shows no advertisements and does not sell your data or share it with advertisers or data brokers. The app sends crash reports and performance data so we can fix problems, never your family's content. Sign in with Google or with your email address. You can delete your account at any time; a family you kept on your own goes with it, while what you added to a shared family stays with the relatives who still use it.
MADE FOR FAMILIES, NOT FOR RECORD HUNTING
Shijro is not a genealogy records database. It does not search census archives or match you with strangers. It is the digital family tree your own family writes: the names, faces, dates, photos and stories, and how everyone fits together. Genealogy research can feed it; Shijro keeps the result.
WHERE THE NAME COMES FROM
A shajra (شجرہ) is the drawn family tree of South Asian and Islamic tradition: gold-rimmed roundels strung down a page on fine lines, a name in each one. Shijro is that, for your phone.
COMING NEXT
- Voice notes and video clips, so a grandparent's voice stays with their page, with transcripts and translations
- A timeline of each life, and importing an existing tree from a GEDCOM file
- Story prompts and help drafting a biography from what the tree already knows
- iPhone and iPad
Shijro is free. Questions or ideas: contact@shijro.com
Build your family tree with relatives: tag family photos, share family history