How to use WEFAMI

1Where to start

Three things first, in this order: create an account, make your own profile, then add your parents and siblings. The tree grows from there.

Signing up needs only an email address and a password. A phone number is optional and makes it easier for relatives to find you.

• Tap Sign up and enter an email and password.
• Open My profile and fill in your name, year of birth and gender. This is your own place in the tree.
• Go to Tree and add your father, mother, then your siblings. A name alone is enough to draw someone.

If you are unsure of an exact date, leave it blank or enter just the year. Whatever you know is enough to start; the rest can come later.

2Reading a box on the chart

Each person is one box. At a glance it tells you whether they are living, their gender, and whether they hold an account.

• An orange tick means the person has claimed this profile and now looks after it themselves.
• A white chrysanthemum and a greyed photograph mean they have died; underneath is the date and how many years ago.
• ♂ and ♀ give the gender, with the year of birth beside it so namesakes do not get confused.
• The children tag says how many children have been entered; tap the box to open or fold the branch below it.

3Adding parents, spouses and children

Tap a person and choose the relationship you want to add. You pick the relationship first and type the name second, so nothing lands in the wrong place.

Parents are capped at one father and one mother. Once both exist the button goes dim. That is deliberate: nobody has more than two parents, and one mistake there tilts the whole branch. Children have no such cap.

• Adding a child: you are asked which couple the child belongs to, so the chart stays unambiguous later.
• Adding a spouse: tick the "married" box so the two are joined by a horizontal line.
• Adding parents to someone already in the tree: open that person and add from there, rather than drawing a new box and joining it afterwards.

Attach parents as soon as you can. Two people with the same name and year of birth are common in a large lineage; with parents attached they never get mixed up.

4More than one wife or husband

This is common in Vietnamese family books. WEFAMI does not pile all the children into one place; it keeps them with the right couple.

• Add the second wife or husband as normal.
• When adding a child, pick the right couple in the "whose child" box.
• On the chart each child joins its own couple’s junction, drawn in its own colour so the eye can follow it.

5The four sides of the chart

Everyone really belongs to two families. Drawing both at once gets tangled, so the chart draws one side at a time, picked at the top of the left column.

• My father’s side: your father’s relatives. Your mother still appears, as his wife, but her parents do not.
• My mother’s side: the mirror image.
• Spouse’s father’s side and Spouse’s mother’s side: the two sides of your husband’s or wife’s family.

There is no "whole tree" option: the larger the lineage, the more useless drawing all of it becomes. Anyone on none of the four sides is found on the Search and lookup page, opened from the foot of the left column.

6On a phone

A phone screen is narrow, so the list of people lives in a sheet at the bottom that you drag up and down.

• Drag up: the list and the search box.
• Drag down: the screen goes back to the chart.
• Pinch to zoom the chart, one finger to pan.

7The profile page

Tapping a name opens that person’s page. Beyond names and dates you can record: everyday name, foreign name, ID number, home village, current city, occupation, education, interests, life story.

For someone who has died there are two more: burial place and type of burial. The burial place takes either a written address or exact coordinates; with coordinates a button appears that opens Google Maps, so relatives coming from far away can find the grave without asking directions.

• Social links: paste one and the page works out whether it is Facebook, Zalo or YouTube.
• Shared document link: a photographed old family book, a recording of a memorial, an inscription — with a line of description so later readers know what it is.

Enter freely whatever the family may see. Anything private can be locked down in the next step.

8Who can see what

Visitors who are not signed in see nothing at all — no names, no photographs, not even how many people are in the tree. Among signed-in members everyone sees everything by default — to hide something, drop that one field into one of the three rings below.

The cut happens on the server before anything is sent, not in the interface. Someone without the right simply never receives the information.

9Locking individual fields

Not every field deserves the same treatment: an ID number is not an occupation. The "Who can see what" button next to Edit opens a window where each field is set on its own.

• By default everything is open to people on the chart. You are all building one tree together, so the starting point is open; narrow the one part you want kept close.
• Three groups: All members · Close family (parents, siblings, children) · Spouse and descendants.
• While nobody has claimed the profile, whoever entered it can change this. Once claimed, only its owner can — nobody decides on someone else’s behalf what the world sees about them.
• There is a shortcut that sets a whole group at once, and it only tightens, never loosens.

Once set, open the page from another family member’s account to see what actually still shows.

10Lunar and solar dates

Memorials run on the lunar calendar while documents carry solar dates. WEFAMI keeps both and converts between them, for births and deaths alike.

• Worked out in Vietnamese time, with leap months handled.
• A lunar date falling in a leap month is marked as such.
• Which calendar your reminders follow is up to you; by default memorials follow the lunar calendar and birthdays the solar one.

An ancestor remembered only by the year can still be recorded, but reminders need a full date to work from.

11Inviting someone to claim their own profile

You drew your uncle, but he knows his own life best. His page has a button that makes an invitation link; send it over a message, and he creates an account and takes that profile as his own.

• The link works once and expires after 30 days.
• After claiming, his box carries the orange tick and he edits his own details.
• Whoever drew him can no longer add children under him without asking. That is deliberate: what is recorded about his children is his business.

12Joining two branches into one tree

Two relatives each use WEFAMI and each records their own branch. As soon as both have entered the same ancestor, merging those two profiles turns the branches into one tree.

• Open Connect and send an invitation by email, phone number or connect code.
• Once they accept, pick the person the two trees have in common.
• Nobody re-enters anything, and each person keeps the say over what they entered.

13Birthday and memorial reminders

The bell in the top bar reminds you before a relative’s birthday or memorial day, so another year does not slip past.

• Open My profile → notification settings to choose: how many days ahead (7 by default), lunar or solar, and how wide a circle.
• Mark notifications read one at a time or all at once.
• People who have died get memorial reminders, not birthday ones.

The bell only tells you what you could already see. A date locked above your level stays unsaid there too.

14Events and appointments

Memorials, weddings, gatherings. You set the conditions, the system works out who qualifies and sends each of them an invitation and a notification.

• Conditions: reach, gender, age range, a cap on numbers. Anything left blank means no limit.
• Invitations only reach relatives who are living and hold an account — that part is fixed, not a setting, because someone who has died has no account to accept with.
• Repeats once, weekly or yearly. Ends at a set time or at the end of the day.
• Guests tap Going, or Decline with a reason. Only the host sees the replies.
• Editing or cancelling tells everyone who was invited.

The cap counts people who accept, not people invited — invite widely, first come first served, and it closes when full.

15Photographs and albums

Each person has one portrait and one album. An old print photographed on a phone is fine, as long as the face is recognisable.

Images are shrunk before upload so they do not eat space, though very large files are still refused.

Photographs live in public storage: anyone holding the exact address can open one without signing in. The addresses carry a random suffix and are hard to guess, but do not upload anything truly sensitive.

16When something goes wrong

Most trouble is an old page still sitting in the browser’s memory. Try these in order before calling support.

• Reload with Ctrl + F5 on a computer, or pull the page down to refresh on a phone.
• Sign out and sign back in.
• Try another browser or a private window, which tells you whether the fault is in the account or the machine.
• Still broken? Write to support, saying which page you were on and what you clicked.