About Tree Me

Our Story

Hi there, I'm Ralph Esslinger, the founder of Tree-Me Application. I'm so glad that you're here!

Let me share with you how Tree-Me started.

As someone who loves discovering about family, I've always enjoyed learning family history both for existing relatives and those who have passed away.

In 2013 while visiting relatives in Germany, I enjoyed getting to know my extended family more. Meeting my 6th cousin by chance was a special moment. Then learning how we are related and filling in name, faces and stories of who is between us has been a fulfilling experience.

While attempting to document extended family relationships, I found the existing tools difficult to use. While talking with the more senior members of the family and attempting to link faces, names and relationships I always got flustered with which screen to enter information which would interrupt the flow of the conversation, so I reverted to taking old fashioned pen and paper followed by considerable time decoding my messy notes and entering information into software. Being a software developer I found myself asking, "There has got to be an easier way than this!"

Then in 2018, I had a breakthrough with an idea on how to create a tree using pictures that could be easily used during conversation so that a chart can be created with faces and names and all participants in the conversation see it and confirm that the relationships are correct.

The trip to Germany in 2019 was much more fun by being able to capture and also share extended family relationships far more easily. My relatives also enjoyed learning and understanding about me and how we were related.

Thanking them for their time with a box of chocolates or some other small gift did not reflect how much I appreciated their time and wanted to give a more meaningful gift. Creating a gift showing their extended family seems like a better gift idea as a way of showing care and interest while also reinforcing their relationships.

Since then I have been striving to make better charts to allow others to have the same experience of connection and understanding as me.

Thankyou for your support

All funds raised go towards maintaining the servers and services required for the app and to the designers and developers to further improve your experience