Overview¶

PastPaths is built around six fundamental building blocks. Once you understand how they fit together, the rest of the manual becomes much easier. This page gives you the bird's-eye view.

The home page — You'll find the main menu along the left side. Each page then has its own options for searching, sorting, and filtering.

The building blocks¶

Persons¶

People are the heart of a family history. A person can have a name, gender, birthplace and place of death, notes, and relationships to other people.

Places¶

A place can be a city, a farm, a house, a church, or a country. Places are linked to persons (where they were born, died, or lived) and to events (where something happened).

By linking places to people instead of typing the location as free text, it becomes easy to later see "who in my family has lived in Hagfors?" or "which events took place at Mariakyrkan?".

Events¶

An event is something that happened at a particular time in a particular place — a birth, a baptism, a marriage, an emigration. Events have a date, a place, participants (persons), and can have media and sources linked to them.

Media¶

Media means photos, documents, audio recordings, and more. The same image can be linked to multiple persons, events, and places — you never need to upload the same photo more than once.

Sources¶

Good genealogical research requires documenting where information comes from — sources. A source might be a parish register, a census, a letter, or an estate inventory. When you say "Erik was born in 1872," you should be able to point to where that information comes from.

Relationships¶

Relationships describe how people are connected: parenthood, marriage, siblings. PastPaths automatically works out indirect relationships (cousin, grandmother, brother-in-law) based on the direct relationships you've entered.

How does it all fit together?¶

Picture a photo of your grandfather. In PastPaths, that photo can be linked to:

The person grandfather
The event "Confirmation 1923"
The place "Härnösand Church"
The source "Family album from Märta"

It's all the same file — no copies needed. And later, when you search for "all photos from Härnösand" or "all photos with grandfather," that same photo shows up in both lists.

That's the difference between collecting photos alongside your genealogical research and letting the photos become part of it.

Extras¶

Beyond the building blocks above, PastPaths has a few supporting features:

Timeline — visualize events chronologically
Blog — write longer family stories
Reports — print family charts and lists
Tags and categories — organize and find things quickly

Where is my data stored?¶

Everything — your database, all images, all documents — is stored locally on your computer, in a folder that PastPaths creates the first time you start it.

C:\Users\YOUR_NAME\AppData\Local\PastPaths

Information about where data is saved — When the installation is complete, an info screen shows where various data is saved. It's a good idea to take a screenshot of it so you can find your way back if you ever need to.

This means two important things:

Your data is private — it never leaves your computer unless you move it yourself.
Backup is your responsibility — if your hard drive fails, the data is gone. More about backups in troubleshooting.