Phase III Completion — Moving into Phase IV
I am excited to share that the features on this platform have been optimized to the point where we need to move into live user testing. The app is built. What we need now is real users interacting with it — finding edge cases, surfacing glitches, and showing us what works and what needs polish.
Successfully onboarding the Genealogy Department will be centered on their ability to deal with the real-world issue cases that come with any web application: users encountering bugs, code that needs adjusting, and general web-app maintenance needs. Moving from Phase III to Phase IV early greatly behooves us.
Moreover, live testing lets us analyze what onboarding actually looks like for the Genealogy Department. Whether that means software or hardware upgrades, whether it means negotiating a structure to keep me on board monitoring the legacy code, or whatever form it takes — it is essential that we get this into users’ hands so we can understand how to properly onboard the department to manage and sustain this platform going forward.
12 features across 4 functional areas
The Du Pont Circle genealogy platform is live at dupontfamily.xyz with 12 distinct features organized into four groups: Explore (tree, lookup, surnames, AI), Connect (directory, messaging, bulletin), Trade (marketplace), and Manage (admin, settings, auth, home). Below is a brief for each.
🌳 Family Tree live
Function: Interactive genealogical chart centered on the logged-in user. Click any name card to explore branches, marriages, children, and lineage up and down through the centuries.
Key capabilities:
- Simple and persistent layout across tab navigation (no re-rendering on page switch)
- Vertical zoom slider for scaling between overview and detail (using the slider not buttons)
- Accent-insensitive multi-word search (handles French diacriticals)
- Expandable Tree Legend explaining all colors and symbols
- Loading screen quips with historical family trivia
Recent changes: Persistent route, zoom slider, search upgrade, legend panel. All on feature/tree-upgrade branch, committed and pushed. (Not yet on the live site — pending local testing and merge to main.)
🔗 Cousin Lookup live
Function: Select any two people in the tree, instantly see the relationship label (“second cousin once removed”) and a visual path through their shared ancestor.
📜 Surname Branches live
Function: Browse the family organized by last name. Search by surname, sort by family size. Provides the macro view of how the family spread geographically and genealogically.
🤖 Ask AI finalizing
Function: Conversational AI that answers natural-language questions about du Pont genealogy using real data from the family database.
Status: Optimizing the intelligence of the model that will be in use for family members. Building well-defined core instructions so that users can have a comprehensive and immersive experience — one that stays on topic, feels conversational rather than complicated, and speaks naturally about family history without veering into generic AI responses. Requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable on Render.
Cost: Pay-per-use. Even 1,000 monthly queries costs ~$0.01. Essentially free at any family scale.
🤝 FamilyConnect live
Function: Private cousin directory with mutual disclosure — users only see as much about others as they share about themselves. Browse by state to find nearby cousins.
Recent changes: Per-field sharing controls (email, phone, state, job/passion, bio). Technical: The backend code logic got updated with new boolean columns on ConnectProfile with to_filtered_dict() enforcing visibility. Migration 1302ce605dbd.
✉ Correspondence live
Function: Private messaging between family members. Letter-card UI with gold flourishes and wax seal aesthetic. Sidebar tab with unread badge, read receipts, browser notifications. Aimed at being longer form than texting and more of a penned letter style than email. People have the option to turn off the ability to receive letters if they would prefer radio silence.
Technical: Backend models (Conversation, ConversationParticipant, Message), RTK Query hooks with 10-second polling. Opt-out available in Settings.
📌 Bulletin Board overhaul planned
Function: Community bulletin board for announcements, volunteer opportunities, and family news. Create, edit, browse. Streamlined design where uniformity allows for less stimulus overload. Each new bulletin item has a good baseline of options with document attach-ability that customization needs will be fulfilled.
Status: Current version is functional but limited. Overhaul planned to support images, links, embedded media, and richer content types. Media types like CSS files or more complex media like longer videos or video-graphic presentations.
🏫 Marketplace live
Function: Private marketplace for buying and selling family artifacts (paintings, furniture, letters, silverware, china, photographs, misc). Photo uploads with optional crop tool. Zelle, Venmo, Cash App preference button does not include a portal to pay through. At this juncture that adds more of a security or complication risk than benefit of convenience.
Dependencies: Cloudinary account configured. Free tier supports early usage. But depending on consistency of a larger user base, a switch to a service that can support better at scale will be considered.
📊 Admin Dashboard live
Function: Stats overview, user list, content moderation for bulletin posts and marketplace items. Technical: Admin CRUD endpoints for adding, editing, and removing individuals from the family tree directly. In other words, there is an active user management system where people can be warned about disruptive behavior or blocked from using certain parts of the site.
🔒 Authentication & ⚙ Settings live
Auth: Clerk handles sign-up, login, session tokens. Enterprise-grade security with encrypted sessions. Passwords never stored on our servers. Clerk is utterly essential to security and authentication. This is a service that will most likely endure for the site’s lifespan.
Settings: Email/password management, correspondence toggle, directory visibility, read receipts, notification preferences.
🏠 Home finalizing
Function: Landing page with historical du Pont image tapestry and quick-link navigation cards. Being refined with hand-curated photo layout in original color (replacing only-grayscale grid).