About 根源 Famiroot

The Problem We Saw

Younger generations growing up abroad often can't distinguish a paternal uncle from a maternal uncle, or name the correct term for a cousin on their father's side versus their mother's side. Generic family tree apps treat "uncle" as one thing — but in Chinese culture, there are at least four distinct types, each with its own title, expectations, and place in the family hierarchy. This cultural depth is being lost with every generation, and Famiroot was built to stop that.

The Diaspora Gap

In building Famiroot, we observed a consistent pattern across overseas Chinese families: the more generations removed from the ancestral homeland, the fewer kinship distinctions survive. English-dominant households tend to collapse four or more distinct uncle types into a single word — "uncle." The same happens with aunts, cousins, and grandparents. What gets lost isn't just vocabulary — it's the encoded information about which side of the family someone belongs to, whether they're older or younger than your parent, and whether they're related by blood or marriage.

Extended Family Terms

Chinese distinguishes between paternal and maternal relatives with completely different terms — a distinction most Western languages don't make.

Note: kinship terms vary across regional dialects — Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew communities each have their own pronunciations and sometimes distinct terms. The terms shown here follow standard Mandarin usage in Traditional Chinese characters.

Immediate Family

Why This Matters for Your Tree

When you add a family member in Famiroot, the system automatically determines the culturally correct kinship term based on the relationship path — distinguishing paternal from maternal, elder from younger, blood from marriage. Every connection you record preserves a piece of cultural knowledge that might otherwise be lost.

Who makes Famiroot

Famiroot is built and maintained by Keith Li, a Hong Kong–based educator and product builder who has taught at universities since 2014. The work here comes from a specific belief: technology should carry a culture forward, not flatten it into whatever the underlying database happens to accept.

Chinese kinship is one of the world's most detailed relational vocabularies — 伯 versus 叔, 堂 versus 表, 內 versus 外, elder versus younger, blood versus marriage. Most family-tree software erases those distinctions the moment it translates a term into "uncle" or "cousin." As Chinese families spread across cities, generations, and languages, that vocabulary is quietly being lost — not because families stopped caring, but because no tool made it easy to hold on to.

Famiroot is that tool. Small, honest, single-purpose: to help Chinese families keep the language of their relationships intact — when children grow up abroad, when a grandparent's memory needs a reference, when a family gathering needs someone to know exactly what to call whom.