Hand a relative one branch to fill in — and pull their work back into the main tree only when you say so. Here is the whole idea, one layer at a time.
Each layer stands on its own. Read the first, stop whenever you have enough, or open the next to go deeper.
Your family tree is yours. You can give a relative their own working copy of just one part of it — say, "you take your father's branch and add your side" — and let them fill it in at their own pace.
When they're done, you review what they added and merge it back into the main tree. Until that moment, nothing they do can change your tree.
Two people, three steps. You (the owner) bookend the work; your relative (the contributor) does the filling-in in the middle.
Pick a person as the anchor and how many generations up or down to include, then send it to your relative's email. They get an editable copy of only that slice.
They open the link and work in their own copy — adding people, dates, photos. You can watch their progress read-only, but they're never editing your live tree.
When it's ready, you press Merge back. Salasilah shows you exactly what would change before anything is written. You approve; only then does the master tree grow.
The obvious design would be to let a relative edit your tree directly, with limits on what they can touch. We deliberately chose not to. The reason is recovery, not capability.
With live shared editing, a single missed permission check — or a well-meant mistake — changes your real tree, mixed in with your own edits, and untangling it later is genuinely hard.
With a copy that merges back:
Same safety as a full change-history system, at a fraction of the complexity — because we only have to protect one moment, not every keystroke.
For every person the contributor touched, Salasilah looks at three versions of each detail and works out what to do:
| What happened | Result |
|---|---|
| Only they changed it | Take theirs |
| Only you changed it | Keep yours |
| You both changed it, differently | Ask you to pick |
| A brand-new person | Added in |
| A person they removed | Proposed only — never auto-deleted |
If the contributor adds someone who already exists elsewhere in your tree, the review flags it as a possible duplicate so you can link the two instead of creating a copy.
The merge machine isn't only for contributor branches. It joins any two trees — including two you built yourself (a mother's side and a father's side, or a small tree a relative emailed you). What changes is only how it figures out who is who.
When one tree came from the other (a contributor branch, or a duplicate you made), Salasilah remembers which person is which. It uses the precise three-version compare from Layer 4.
Two trees built separately share no history, so Salasilah proposes matches by name, dates and parents — and you confirm every single one. It never fuses two people on its own.
A small imported tree can therefore add a lot and overwrite nothing you didn't approve.
— Placeholder closing thought: a family record is trust made durable. The tools should protect that trust before they do anything clever. (Rewrite freely.)