Legacify

Family Tree

Recording Nigerian family lineage as families actually hold it.

The first module of Legacify, an archive for Nigerian heritage.

A family tree on Legacify. One man at the head, three wives listed as Wife 1, Wife 2 and Wife 3, the third recorded as name not recalled. Children under each wife, one born in the 1930s, one born around the time of the war, and a daughter with her own child and grandchild beneath her. Under the first son, the Adéwùmí branch is drawn in place, marked as kept in its own archive.
Ajílàbíòwú. A household of three wives, a child born "around the time of the war", a wife nobody can name any more, and a daughter carrying her own line. Every one of those is an ordinary Nigerian record and a broken field in most family tree software. Under Túndé sits the Adéwùmí branch, a family that took its own surname and keeps its own archive, drawn inside the parent tree without being copied into it. The family is real and one of the ten piloting this. The people in it are sample records generated during testing.

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What Legacify is for

Legacify is a digital archive for Nigerian heritage. Family histories, the founding stories of towns, royal and chieftaincy records, oral accounts, photographs, manuscripts and the objects a community keeps. Most of it sits in one of two places, in the memory of an elder or in a cupboard, and both are running out of time.

The people holding it are families, palaces and community archives. They are not careless with it and they are not short of material. What they lack is somewhere to put it that survives a flood, a house move, a fire and the death of the one person who knew what it was. Legacify is meant to be that second copy, with each community keeping control of who may see what.

It began with ten families in one Ekiti town, and it is now open to families from every part of Nigeria. The Family Tree, this site, is the first piece of it to be built.

How the Family Tree works

A family's Head Admin opens an archive and records the people in it. Each person can carry photographs and voice recordings, the names they were also known by, and the dates that matter. Relatives are then invited to claim their own record and keep it correct, so the archive stops being one person's project and becomes the family's.

Most genealogy software was written for a different shape of family. It expects one marriage at a time, a man at the root of every line, one legal name per person and a birth certificate for everybody. Legacify treats a polygamous household as ordinary, lets a daughter root a branch of her own, records fostering as the real relationship it is, carries every name a person answers to, and accepts a birth date that nobody can place closer than a decade.

What it looks like

A person's record on Legacify. A panel at the top headed how you are related reads your great-grandfather, Adéwùmí is your father's father's father, and bàbá bàbá bàbá mi in Yorùbá, with the line drawn down through three generations to the reader. Below it the record shows year of birth, gender, and three other names he answered to.
Adéwùmí. One person's record, opened by his great-grandson. The archive works out how the two of them are related and says it in English and in the family's own language, because bàbá bàbá bàbá mi is what somebody would actually call him. Underneath, the three other names he answered to sit beside the one on the certificate, none of them more official than the rest.
Adding a relative on a phone. First a question asking who the new person is related to and how, then the details form with fields for the name, a checkbox reading nobody recalls their name this is a description, gender, living or deceased, and when they were born with the option nobody knows.
Akínyẹdé. Recording a relative. The relationship is asked first and the rest of the form only appears once it resolves, so nobody fills in a page of detail and then finds the uncle it hangs off was never recorded. Every field but the name can be left empty.
A family tree on a phone screen, four generations stacked in a single readable column from the oldest man recorded down to a grandchild born in 2003.
Fágbọrọ̀. A tree on a phone, four generations deep. Recording happens in a sitting room with an elder talking, not at a desk, so every screen is built for the handset somebody already owns and for a connection that comes and goes.

What a family keeps hold of

Where the work has reached

The Family Tree is live. It opened on 1 October 2026 with ten families of Ọ̀rún-Èkìtì in Ekiti State, and any Nigerian family, from any state, can now open its own archive.

The rest of Legacify is designed and not yet built. The document vault, the oral history library, the community and palace archives, and the search that can follow a name out of one family and into another. That is the part this page is asking for help with.

Where it began: the ten families of Ọ̀rún-Èkìtì

The pilot began with ten families of one Ekiti town. Four of them are in the screens above. Here are the other six, and no two of these archives are the same shape, because families are not the same shape as each other. A tool that only handled one of them would have failed at the second family, never mind the tenth. The people shown are sample records generated during testing.

The Òfi family tree, showing births recorded as a decade, as the year of the great famine, and one with no date at all.
Òfi. Birth years as a family actually remembers them. A decade, a famine, and one nobody can place at all.
The Ògúnjẹ́milúà family tree, showing five generations of one line from the 1850s to the present.
Ògúnjẹ́milúà. Five generations in one unbroken line, each hanging off the one before.
The Àró family tree, showing four children of one household in birth order.
Àró. Four children of one household, held in birth order rather than by date.
The Ọ̀ṣátìmẹhín family tree, with a woman at the head of it and the line running down through her daughter and granddaughter.
Ọ̀ṣátìmẹhín. A woman at the head of the line, and the line running down through her daughters. Ordinary, and missing from most software.
The Abíọ́dún family tree, showing Táíwò and Kẹ́hìndé both born on the fourteenth of June 1958, and Ìdòwú born three years after them.
Abíọ́dún. Táíwò and Kẹ́hìndé share a birthday because they share a birth, and Ìdòwú is named for following twins. A tree that cannot hold that cannot hold a great many Yorùbá families.
The Òdúṣínà family tree, showing a daughter raised in the house from infancy listed among the children born to it.
Òdúṣínà. Ibùkún was raised in this house from infancy and every person in it will tell you she is their sister. The archive records that as adoptive, which is the true word for it and not a smaller one.

And every part of the country

Legacify is for every Nigerian family, wherever it counts home. From Sokoto to Calabar, from Maiduguri to Badagry, any family can have its history written in digital gold, kept safe and handed on to the children who come after. Below are sample families from across Nigeria. The names and the people are made up for this page, because a real family's archive is private and none is shown here unless that family offers it. What they show is real all the same: the tree is not built around one people's names or one shape of household.

A sample family tree for the Sulaimanu family of Zaria, Kaduna State. The founder is recorded as born in the 1890s, a son in the 1920s, and a daughter as born during Hitler’s war.
North West. Sulaimanu of Zaria, Kaduna State. A founder nobody can date closer than the 1890s, and a daughter born “during Hitler’s war”, which is how her generation said it.
A sample family tree for the Hamman family of Yola, Adamawa State. Two wives are listed, with two children under each.
North East. Hamman of Yola, Adamawa State. Two wives, and every child listed under their own mother.
A sample family tree for the Agbo family of Otukpo, Benue State. A daughter, Ene, has her son and granddaughter listed beneath her under the surname Oche.
North Central. Agbo of Otukpo, Benue State. Ene’s son and granddaughter carry their father’s name, Oche, and still sit in the family she was born into.
A sample family tree for the Adébọ́lá family of Abẹ́òkúta, Ogun State, running four generations from a man born in 1928 to a child born in 2019.
South West. Adébọ́lá of Abẹ́òkúta, Ogun State. Four generations, from a man born in 1928 down to a great-granddaughter born in 2019.
A sample family tree for the Obiefuna family of Nnewi, Anambra State. Three sons are listed in birth order, each with a child beneath him.
South East. Obiefuna of Nnewi, Anambra State. Three sons in the order they were born, each with a line of his own beneath him.
A sample family tree for the Asuquo family of Calabar, Cross River State, with a woman at the head of it and the line running down through her daughter and granddaughter.
South South. Asuquo of Calabar, Cross River State. A family that counts from a mother, with the line running down through her daughter and granddaughter.

Help us build the rest

Legacify is a project of Legacy Lab NG, a social impact innovation hub, and it has been built on very little. The Family Tree module exists to show that the idea works. Funding it properly is what turns it into an archive the rest of the country can use, while the people who carry the knowledge are still here to record it.

We are looking for four things.

  • Sponsors and grants, to build the full platform beyond the family tree.
  • Families willing to be recorded next, wherever in Nigeria they are from.
  • Partners and institutions. Archives, palaces, universities, cultural bodies and diaspora associations.
  • Volunteers. Developers, researchers, and anyone who can sit with an elder and listen properly.

Write to hello@legacylab.ng and say which of the four you are, or use the contact form.

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