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Family Historian Mobile

Family Historian Mobile is a companion app for Family Historian 8 and above. It lets you take your family tree with you and browse it on your phone or tablet.

The app is designed around people primarily. You can:

  • Open any person and see their facts, relationships, sources, notes and media gallery.
  • View their associated places on a map.
  • Explore an interactive pedigree/descendant tree.
  • Search your tree as you type.
  • Follow links through to source and place pages.

It handles trees with thousands of people. Everything runs on your phone. It doesn’t upload data to anywhere else.

Availability

  • Android: the app is available to download and install now, and a formal beta is starting. Feedback is very welcome.
  • iPhone: a version is in development.

Installing Family Historian Mobile on Android

  1. On your phone, open this page (https://www.family-historian.co.uk/fh-mobile) in a web browser and click on this link:
    • Family Historian Mobile (1.1.5, 15 Oct 2026)
    • A file will be downloaded to your phone. Alternatively, you can download it to your PC and copy it from there to the phone. The file is known as an ‘APK’. This stands for ‘Android Package Kit’. Please note requires Android 10 or above.
  2. Open the downloaded file. Android will warn that it comes from outside the Play Store, and will ask you if you wish to allow installs from that source. In the prompt, tap Settings and set Allow from this source to ‘on’ for the app you’re using (e.g. Chrome or Files). Then go back and tap Install.
  3. If Play Protect shows a warning, you will need to choose Install anyway to proceed, as the app isn’t available from the Play Store yet.
  4. We recommend that you set Allow from this source back to ‘off’ afterwards.

Getting your tree onto your Android phone

  1. Export from Family Historian 8. Choose Export to Family Historian Mobile on the File menu. In most cases you can just accept the default options. This will create a Gedzip (.gdz) file. Unlike a plain GEDCOM file, a Gedzip includes your photos and other media.
  2. Move it to your Android phone. One way of moving the file to your phone is to copy the .gdz file to a cloud drive such as OneDrive. Bear in mind that in recent versions of Windows, all of your main files and folders are likely to already be located within OneDrive, by default, so almost wherever you put it, it is likely to be on OneDrive. In any case, make a note of its location. If you plan to use OneDrive, to access your file, you will need to have the OneDrive app installed on your phone and you will need to login to it using the same account that you use on your main PC. You don’t have to use cloud drives. You can use any technique you like for moving the file to your phone. You could, for example, simply email the file to your phone. Note: With some cloud drives, such as GoogleDrive, you may not be able to access the cloud drive copy of the file directly from Family Historian Mobile in Step 3 below. In that case you will need to copy the file from the cloud drive into a local file area on your phone as part of step 2.
  3. Now open Family Historian Mobile and click on the green ‘Import a File’ button. If your file is on OneDrive, you should see ‘OneDrive’ listed as a place to look for your file. Click on that and locate the file. If you’re not using OneDrive, look for it wherever it is located on your phone. Bear in mind if you use a cloud drive of any kind, that cloud drives can sometimes be slow to sync. If it does not appear, consider the possibility that you closed your desktop PC before the file had been successfully sync’d to the server. If using Google Drive download the file from Google drive to downloads and then load the file from the local folder.
  4. The first load of a large tree can take a moment. After that the file will be cached for fast reopening.

Tips for keeping Family Historian Mobile up-to-date

The instructions above cover how to get a full copy of your project data, including pictures, into Family Historian Mobile. If you regularly make changes to your project data, you are likely to want to ensure that Family Historian Mobile is kept up-to-date. One advantage of OneDrive (or another cloud drive that works the same way) is that it is easy to do this. It’s recommended to always keep your exported .gdz file in the same place (the ‘public’ subfolder of your project, say, if the project itself is kept on OneDrive). Then you just need to update the file periodically on your PC (using ‘Export to Family Historian Mobile’), and then refresh again within Family Historian Mobile (using that green ‘Import a File’ button and looking for the file in its usual place). However, what if you are away from home and you forgot to refresh the .gdz file and you want to look at the latest changes you made to your project?

As well as being able to load a GEDZIP file, Family Historian Mobile can also load a GEDCOM file. If you keep your project on your PC on a OneDrive folder, and if you use OneDrive on your phone, you can always access the latest version of your project data by opening the project’s GEDCOM file—the file that project data is stored in—using Family Historian Mobile (see “How to locate the project’s GEDCOM file” below). The advantage of this is that you do not have to remember to keep it refreshed. OneDrive should automatically sync it to your phone for you, in the background. The disadvantage is that GEDCOM files do not contain pictures, so if you open the file on your phone, the information in it should be up-to-date, but you won’t see any pictures. However, Family Historian Mobile allows you to have as many projects as you like; so one option would be to have 2 versions of your project – one with pictures and one without.

How to locate the project’s GEDCOM file: if you know where your project folder is located—if not, click ‘File Statistics’ on the File menu to find it—and if the project is called “My Family”, look for a subfolder within that called “My Family.fh_data”. Within that, there will be a file called “My Family.ged” which is the GEDCOM file. Please note that file suffixes do not ordinarily display in File Explorer unless you have requested that they should display. So the “.ged” part of the file name may not be visible.