KinCanvas — GEDCOM viewer and family tree charts

KinCanvas reads a GEDCOM file — the family file format that every genealogy program and every family history site lets you export — and draws the family tree in it.

Get KinCanvas from the Microsoft Store

What it draws

Ancestor charts: one person at the top, with their parents, grandparents and so on behind them.
Descendant charts: one person at the top and everybody who came after them.
Fan charts: the same ancestry folded into a circle, which fits far more generations on one page than a tree can.
Relationship answers in words: pick two people and KinCanvas tells you how they are related, worked out from the file itself.

Printing that is worth doing

A five-generation ancestor tree is 5,304 pixels wide. Squeezed onto one sheet it is unreadable, so KinCanvas does not do that: it tiles the chart across as many sheets as it needs at full size and tells you how many before you print. A4, A3, US Letter, portrait and landscape. You can also export the chart as SVG and print it anywhere you like.

Made for real family files

Genealogy files are messy, and KinCanvas is built for that: GEDCOM 5.5.1 with the ANSEL, UTF-8 and ANSI encodings real files come in, the broken cross-references they contain, and people with no name recorded shown as such instead of as an empty box. A chart that hits a size limit says so, and says which limit, instead of quietly drawing a smaller tree that looks complete.

What you get free, and what Pro adds

Free: open one family file at a time, ancestor and descendant charts up to four generations, and the closest relationship between any two people. Pro is a single one-off purchase that adds unlimited files and generations, the fan chart, every shared lineage between two people, printing at true size and SVG export. No subscription, no account.

Your family file stays on your PC

KinCanvas has no sign-in, never uploads the file and works with no internet connection at all. There is no telemetry and no advertising. The only thing that uses the network is the Microsoft Store handing over the optional Pro purchase, and no family data — not a name, not a date, not a file path — is part of that.