Hello — and thank you if you’ve joined us recently.
It’s been quiet here for a few weeks. The last time I posted was to explain the move from Forebears to MyForebears, and to point existing users toward the new app. Since then, a steady stream of new subscribers has arrived. I’m grateful for that — and I know that when a product goes quiet after a big transition, the natural question is: what’s happening next?
This post is a short “holding update”: we’re still here, we’re working hard, and what’s in the pipeline is substantial.
What we’ve been building
The next release is not a minor tidy-up or a collection of small fixes. Two themes dominate everything right now.
Sources — We’re reshaping how MyForebears thinks about evidence. Full source integration was always the long game: tying what you see in the tree to what you actually read in the record, with a workflow that stays usable on a phone or tablet. That’s a large design and engineering problem, and it touches capture, storage, editing, and how facts and citations relate to each other. It’s the kind of change that rewrites how the app feels, not only what it stores.
A native Mac app — Mac users deserve an experience that feels at home on the desktop: windows, keyboard, and the habits you already have on macOS. We’re building a dedicated Mac version of MyForebears so you’re not living inside an “iPad app on the Mac” compromise. I want using the app on a Mac to feel familiar and enjoyable, not like a workaround.
Both of these are the sort of projects that eat evenings and weekends. I’m still a few weeks out from the next release I’m happy to put in your hands — but the direction is set and the work is very much in motion.
The bit I didn’t expect to write two years ago
It’s fair to say that when I first looked seriously at full source integration in MyForebears (Forebears, as it was then), the scale of it was intimidating. As a single developer, “do it properly” didn’t feel realistically achievable without cloning myself.
Things have changed. I now use Cursor as part of my everyday development setup. It doesn’t replace judgment or design; it helps with the heavy lifting — searching the codebase, drafting and checking routine changes, and keeping specifications and implementation aligned. I still decide what we build and why, but I’m not carrying every detail in my head in quite the same way as before.
Sources in Practice
If you’re wondering what that work actually looks like in the product, here are some of the principles we’re building around:
- A jigsaw, not a single autopilot tree — Each source can live in MyForebears as its own small family picture, with full app features—but turning many sources into one coherent tree still needs your judgement. We use Source Groups alongside a single Master Group that grows step by step.
- Your workflow, your order — Some researchers sketch the Master Group first as a strawman to guide the search; others start from a new record and push the frontier outward. Both have to feel natural.
- Citations that carry the argument — Facts and relationships from each source need to stay tied to the Master Group so you can test evidence across sources without mentally reloading every document—and so alternative answers can sit in the model with different credibility, not as a vague note.
- Capture that matches the record — Source capture is not “always the same as editing the wheel.” A census is one document, one household, one address; ages imply birth ranges, not neat birth dates. Templates do that heavy lifting so you are not retyping the same structure for every person.
Thank you for reading, and for your patience while we get this right. I’ll post again when there’s a firm date for the next release; until then, know that the quiet spell has been productive, not idle — and that MyForebears is very much alive.
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