What’s new in the archive
Kinlight grows by hand. Every volume, biography and story below was researched, written and checked before it went up, and corrections to the record are logged here too.
Twelve more lives: a bride-show winner, a novelist archduchess and the god of sleep
New full biographies for Maria of Amnia, chosen in the earliest recorded Byzantine bride-show and divorced six years later. Eleanor of Scotland, twice regent of Tyrol, helped bring the prose novel into German. Fausta was executed by her husband Constantine for reasons that were never established. Helena Palaiologina was the last Despotess of Serbia. Also new: Marcia Euphemia, Leontia, Irene Angelina, Afranius Hannibalianus, Andronikos Palaiologos, father of Michael VIII, Domitilla, the mother of Titus and Domitian, and from the myths Hypnos and the Oceanid Electra.
Twelve more lives: child emperors, a first elector and the mother of the Pleiades
New full biographies for Andronikos V, a boy emperor of Thessalonica unknown to historians until 1967, and David Tiberius, an emperor at ten who ended in exile on Rhodes. Andronikos IV fought his father for the throne for twelve years. Konstantios Doukas was an emperor for eighteen years who never ruled and died at Dyrrhachium. Also new: Galla, the mother of Galla Placidia, the empress Sophia, Manuel Komnenos, ancestor of the emperors of Trebizond, Staurakios, Tiberius, Ernest Augustus, the first Elector of Hanover, Maria Leopoldine, empress at sixteen, and Pleione, mother of the Pleiades.
Twelve biographies of the less famous: empresses, duchesses and a lost heir
New full biographies for people the history books pass over. Lucilla, who plotted against her brother Commodus. Licinia Eudoxia, twice an empress and seven years a captive of the Vandals. Helena Kantakouzene, whose wedding ended a civil war and who was later held hostage by her own son. Catherine Zaccaria, wife of the Despot of the Morea, who fled to Corfu when it fell. Cymburgis of Masovia, from whom every later Habsburg descends. Also new: Eutropia, Basilina, Irene Laskarina, Basil Argyros, Leo Diogenes, Viridis Visconti and Elisabeth of Bohemia, married at eight and dead at fifteen.
Eleven more biographies, from Constantine to Lady Louise
Full biographies for Constantine the Great, for Justinian’s sister Vigilantia, for Atia, the mother of Augustus, and for Hadrian’s father, Publius Aelius Hadrianus Afer, who died when his son was ten and left him to be raised by Trajan. From the Habsburgs come Ferdinand I of Austria, who gave up his throne in 1848, and Ferdinand Karl, founder of the House of Austria-Este. The British line gains Æthelflæd Eneda, the first wife of King Edgar, Lord Snowdon, Captain Mark Phillips, David Armstrong-Jones and Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor.
A relationship calculator: what cousin is that?
A new page names any blood relationship from two simple counts: what each person is to the ancestor they share. Pick a grandchild and a great-grandchild and it answers first cousin once removed, says the relationship both ways and explains the counting in plain words. A full relationship chart sits beneath it, and every square sets the calculator. The worked examples are real pairs from the archive, among them Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, and Victoria and Albert, each linked to its story.
Every tree in the archive, free to print
A new page gathers the printable family trees: the British royal line, the Roman and Byzantine emperors, the Habsburgs and the Greek gods. Each opens its tree with the free sheet ready, the whole tree with every branch unfolded on one A4 or A3 page, drawn as a PDF on your own device.
Nine new Byzantine biographies
Full biographies for Justinian’s parents, Vigilantia and Sabbatius, for Irene Asanina, who held Didymoteicho through a civil war, for Helena, the wife of Julian, and for Nikephoros Diogenes, Alexander, Michael III, Alexios I Komnenos and Constantine XI, the last emperor. Vigilantia’s page tells why even her name is an assumption, and where the name Bigleniza came from.
Each person’s place in the family, and a way to share it
Person pages now say where someone stands in the whole tree, worked out from the record: how they were related to the best-known names of their volume, where they came among their brothers and sisters when every birth year is known, and how many of their descendants the archive holds. Each page can also be shared, and links to the volumes, the houses and the people without a portrait now show a card naming the family instead of a plain logo. Browsers that cannot draw the 3D tree now show the whole record as text instead of a dead end.
Begin your own book straight from the GEDCOM page
The page about keeping your own family book now opens with a short form: give the book a name and write the first person, and you are inside it. A GEDCOM file from Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch or Gramps opens from the same place. The page also answers more questions: how to get a GEDCOM file out of a genealogy site, what Kinlight reads from it and which versions work.
Keep your own books in your Google Drive, if you like
The books you write yourself can now be copied to a folder in your own Google Drive and kept in step as you write. Connect the same account on another device and your books, portraits and pictures are there too. It is optional and off until you connect it in the library. The books go from your browser straight to your Drive and never pass through Kinlight, which can see only the files it puts in its own folder. If the same book is changed on two devices before they meet, nothing is overwritten: one version is kept beside the other as a separate book.
Your own family books get a page for every person
In a book you keep yourself, each person now has a page of their own, opened from their name in the side panel. There is room for one long story with headings, italics, quotations and links, for up to ten pictures with captions and years, and for the whole record to be edited in one wide form instead of the narrow panel. Parents, partners and children can be added from the page. As before, the book stays on your device, and the pictures travel with it when you save it to a file.
Full biographies for the hundred most-read people
Elizabeth II, Victoria, Henry VIII, Augustus, Marie Antoinette, Zeus and ninety-four others now have a proper biography in place of a short entry. Each was written from several sources, among them the Royal Family’s own pages, Westminster Abbey, Britannica, World History Encyclopedia and the ancient authors, then checked line by line by a second reader. Their pages also gain a small gallery of further images, and the sources are listed at the foot of each page. The same research corrected a number of details in the shorter entries across the archive.
The British royal line brought up to date
Five additions: Princess Beatrice’s second daughter Athena (born 2025), Princess Eugenie’s daughter Adelaide (born 2026), Harriet Sperling, who married Peter Phillips in June 2026, and Wilhelm II’s two wives, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein and Hermine Reuss of Greiz. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson now appear under the names they have used since his titles were removed in 2025.
Stories: articles only the archive can write
Seventeen stories computed from the family trees themselves — how two people are related, traced along every line to their nearest shared ancestors; which marriages in a dynasty joined relatives; the longest unbroken line from parent to child. Among them: how Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were related, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, George V and his cousins the Kaiser and the Tsar, the Julio-Claudian emperors and Augustus, and Zeus and Hera. Any two people can also be traced in the tree, and every person page now asks “how is this person related to…”.
Thirteen new people in the British royal line
Prince Albert’s parents and the Coburg grandparents he shared with Victoria; Christian IX of Denmark and his children George I of Greece and Empress Maria Feodorovna; Alexander III of Russia; Kaiser Wilhelm II; and Joan Beaufort and Ralph Neville, the parents of Cecily Neville. With them the tree can show the cousinships the royal houses were built on.
Every person has a page of their own
Each of the archive’s people now has a readable page — portrait, dates, the whole biography, a dated life, their family as links, and a small diagram of where they stand in the tree, which opens the 3D view focused on them. The side panel’s “read more” leads there.
Longer biographies for 267 more people
Consorts, princes and princesses whose entries were a single line — Maria Anna of Austria, Queen of Portugal; Cecily Neville; Galla Placidia; Philip IV’s queens — now have biographies of their own, each written from the linked sources and checked a second time. The same research corrected a few dozen dates and facts in the record, two misattached portraits and eight broken source links.
Print a family tree
Any book in the archive, including your own, can be printed as a free tree sheet or ordered as an heirloom print.
Begin your own book
Start a family tree of your own beside the historical ones — write it in the same ledger, add portraits, bring in a GEDCOM export from another service, or save it as a .kinbook file. It stays on your device.
Biographies for every crowned figure
All 317 monarchs, emperors and ruling princes in the four historical volumes gained full biographies, each checked against its sources.
About & method
A page on where the archive’s facts come from, how houses are assigned and what the tree can and cannot tell you.
House and dynasty pages
Every royal house and imperial dynasty now has its own page — the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Komnenoi — with its members and span, and the brackets beside the tree lead to them.
The Olympians
The Greek gods, from Chaos to the Olympians and their famous children, on a new shelf for myth and saga.
The House of Habsburg
From Rudolf I to the present head of the house — the family that married its way across Europe.
The Byzantine Emperors, and a home at kinlight.org
Constantine the Great to Constantine XI and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The archive also moved to its own address.
The Roman Emperors
Augustus to the fall of the West, with the adoptions that made so many of Rome’s heirs.
The British Royal Line
The first volume: Alfred the Great to the present day, forty generations on one tree.