Family Historian Mobile is a free companion app for ƒh8 that puts your projectA Project is a Windows folder, created by Family Historian, which contains all your Family Tree information recorded in Family Historian. Normally located in the Documents\Family Historian Projects folder. on your phone, to browse rather than edit. Everything stays on the phone; nothing is uploaded anywhere else.

Availability

At the launch of ƒh8 the Android app can be downloaded from the Family Historian website (it is not yet in the Play Store) and is in a formal beta, with feedback welcome. An iPhone version is in development. Calico Pie’s Family Historian Mobile page has the current position.

What It Shows

The app is built around people. Open anyone to see their factsFacts are one of the key concepts at the heart of Family Historian; they are how you record the things that happened to, or described, each ancestor (Individual)., relationships, sourcesSource: "where information was found". This could be anything from an archive in a county records office, a book, or even a relative's recorded recollection. Citing your Sources helps to show how you reached a particular conclusion about an Individual., notesFamily Historian version 6 and below supports two types of Notes: Local notes (associated with a single person, record, or fact); and Note Records (sometimes called Shared Notes), that can be linked to multiple records and/or facts. Version 7 introduced and pictures, or their placesAccording to GEDCOM, a Place should hold "The jurisdictional name of the place where the event took place…"   on a map; move around an interactive pedigree and descendant tree; search as you type. It supports the Version 8 data types, Address"The address structure should be formed as it would appear on a mailing label…", according to GEDCOM; however, this is capable of a number of interpretations, and Address and Place are best considered together. records included, and rich-text notes with tables and hyperlinks, and it copes with trees of thousands of people.

Installing It on Android

Open the Family Historian Mobile page on the phone and tap the link to the app file (an APK). Android will warn that it comes from outside the Play Store: allow installs from that source for the app you are using (Chrome or Files, say), then tap Install, and Install anyway if Play Protect objects. Calico PieCalico Pie Limited is a UK software house, and the publishers of Family Historian. recommend switching Allow from this source off again afterwards.

Getting Your Project onto the Phone

1. In ƒh8 choose File > Export to Family Historian Mobile; the defaults are usually fine. This makes a compact Gedzip (.gdz) file which, unlike a plain GEDCOMGEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. It is a file format that most genealogical programs and online trees recognise. file, includes your pictures, scaled down to suit a phone.
2. Get the file onto the phone. A cloud drive such as OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox is the easiest way (for OneDrive, the phone app must be signed in to the same account as the PC). Emailing it to yourself also works.
3. In the app, tap Import a File and find it. If it is not there, the cloud drive may not have finished syncing.

The first load of a large tree takes a while; after that it is cached. The app does not change your data, so to bring it up to dateWhen an Event happened, or an Attrribute was true. after working in ƒh, export again and import the new file.

See also Family Historian Mobile in the ƒh help.