About

The Emelander (originally Amelander) name traces back to the island of Ameland in the northern Netherlands. The family eventually emigrated to the United States. Don's research traced many branches back to their Dutch origins. You can read more in his writeup about the family.

The tree goes back several hundred years for some branches, all the way to the 1600s and 1700s in the Netherlands. The depth varies by branch — some lines have very detailed records while others have gaps. Dutch church and civil records have been invaluable for the earlier generations.

Many places! This data was compiled from what Don provided as well as data from freely available web resources. It was compiled using AI (ChatGPT and Claude) as well as manual efforts by volunteers to ensure accuracy and fix issues. It is far from perfect, and is a constant work in progress. A lot of effort is being made to ensure references are included in each person's bio and in contributed artifacts to help provide evidence for those who want to verify for themselves.

If you see any issues please register an account and report issues. Registering gives you the ability to share stories, memories, or facts about a family member on their wall or report data issues for an editor to later review and fix. If you want to become an editor, first of all thank you, all you have to do after you register is request to be an editor in your settings page and I will get it for approval. It may take some time and I may reach out to verify who you are.

Only editors and administrators can upload artifacts (photos, documents, etc.) to a person's page. If you have a photo or document you'd like added, either request editor access or contact me and I can add it for you.

Each person's page has a Wall tab where registered users can share memories, stories, or facts about that family member. Think of it as a guestbook for each person. Anyone with a registered account can post on the wall.

If you see data errors, missing info, or corrections needed for a person, visit their page and use the Issues tab to report it. If you see a bug with how the site works, use Report Bug from the menu. Both require a registered account.

This site is completely free, has no ads, no restrictions, and no subscriptions. Family tree information shouldn't be behind a paywall. Unlike many genealogy services, there are no limits on how much you can view or how many people you can look up.

It is built on a modern, scalable architecture designed to stay fast even with large data sets. The site is carefully designed to work well on mobile devices, though the interactive tree view does require some horizontal scrolling on smaller screens.

CloudFamilyTree is the open-source framework this site is built on. It was built with the assistance of Claude Code, but with a ton of guidance, tweaking, and manual edits. It is designed to be low cost to operate by using serverless autoscaling solutions. It uses AWS CDK to deploy to an AWS account and uses Lambda and API Gateway for the API, DynamoDB for data storage, S3 to store web content and artifacts, CloudFront to serve up web content, and Cognito for user management. Like the data itself, it is still a work in progress.

Yes! CloudFamilyTree is open source and available on GitHub. It is designed to be deployable for any family with a single config file change. If you run into trouble or have questions, contact me and I am happy to help.