What's new in Oakbough Family

What changed in each version. The app tells you when a new one is out.

0.18.1 — 8 October 2026

One search, everywhere. Every search box — People, Ctrl+P, “Find person” on the map, Places, Sources, the research log, the Registry, even the exported family website — finds what you type word by word, in any order: “wies nowa” finds “Nowa Wieś”.
People are found by every name — birth surname, married name, nickname — whichever one the name display shows.
The surname filter on the tree and the map takes both surnames.
A search with no hits says “nothing matches” instead of “no sources yet”, and a typed space in the People search box no longer disappears.

Life Story can tell each event’s own note as the caption, with its place and date underneath (Filters → Cinema; off by default).
Life Story ends on a legacy: after the last event a card counts the descendants (“9 children · 42 grandchildren”), and they spread across the map for the seconds you choose.
Pausing a film no longer turns the date back.

Place review: one window for every place the app could not put on the map on its own — a card per place with numbered suggestions, online search, “same as…”, keyboard shortcuts and undo.
Only what is certain goes on the map. Coordinates an older version had guessed come off the map and wait for your review.
Spellings of one place (“Paris” next to “Paris, France”) merge in one step; buildings and addresses sit “within” their town.
Settings is now a window with sections — General, Archive and backups, Import and export, Map and places and more — and opens where you left it.
The map, the Places panel and the Registry now give the same place counts and the same place names.

Explained evidence gaps. A fact without a source can say why — the record was never kept, it was destroyed, or you searched and found nothing — and it leaves the to-do list.
One rule such as “no birth registers in Scotland before 1750” explains every matching fact at once.
The reason survives a GEDCOM round-trip, and the Registry can find explained gaps.

Life Story draws routes that share a road side by side, and you choose how long old routes take to fade.
Life Story remembers your choices — film length, story mode and the rest.
GEDCOM import no longer attaches a person to someone else’s family; cancelling “+ child” leaves no ghost spouse behind.

Life Story becomes a film: a cinema mode for recording, title and end cards, captions that keep clear of the TikTok and Reels buttons.
Sound: a note for each event, a quiet music bed, each sound with its own switch — or your own MP3, OGG, WAV or FLAC files.
A person’s story or the whole story: stop only at the main person’s events while the rest of the family moves in between.
The camera follows the line instead of jumping, and Space starts and stops playback.

The app tells you when a new version is out. Once a day it asks oakbough.com; only the version number and the system are sent — nothing about you or your tree — and one switch in Settings turns it off.

A film length for Life Story (30, 60 or 90 seconds): empty years shrink first, so the whole story fits.
Map points by person or by place — one marker per place with a count, and a fan of names when you hover over it.
Couples who married twice are one couple in the tree, each child belongs to the right union, and a union can be split or merged.
Years before 1000 and dates BC are understood.
Search ignores case and diacritics everywhere.

Several spouses, readably: a mark for several marriages on the tree card and clearer marriage lines.
Long names wrap onto two lines in the tree instead of being cut off.
Changing the theme repaints the tree, the graph and the timeline at once.

The fields for a new archive’s name and for merging places look like every other field.

“Who are you in this tree?” — asked on the home screen right after an import.
Importing a large tree takes seconds, not minutes, and the app no longer freezes after opening a big archive.
Map density settings, and the guides one click away from the About window.
The first import into a new archive no longer warns about “replacing” it.
A new logo and app icon.

StemmaFiles is now Oakbough Family. Your archives, settings and license carry over on first run, and the new app installs next to the old one.
An optional full world place database (one download, about 200 MB) instead of choosing country packs.
Historical and foreign names find the right place — “Danzig” is Gdańsk.
The map no longer puts people on the wrong continent, and a guessed place says it is a guess.

Older history, from before the Oakbough name, lives in the app’s full changelog, in Polish.