Frequently asked questions
Everything you might wonder about your many surnames.
How are my surnames worked out?
In Spain everyone carries their father’s first surname and their mother’s first surname. Keep counting and your third surname is your father’s second, your fourth your mother’s second, and so on: each parent brings their whole list, interleaved with the other’s.
Applied to every generation in the tree, your parents give 2 surnames, your grandparents 4, your great-grandparents 8 and your great-great-grandparents 16. Where something is missing we write “_” so the rest stays in place.
Why “A Thousand Surnames”?
Because each generation doubles your surnames: 2 are yours, 4 your parents’, 8 your grandparents’… Ten full generations would give you 1,024 surnames, about a thousand. In computing, 1,024 is a “kibi” (Ki): hence our mascot’s name, Kibi: a family cookie with a face, and a bite out of it for the ancestors still missing.
What does “_” mean?
A surname we don’t know because a person or a detail is missing from the tree. The app tells you who to research to fill the first gap, and how many surnames in a row you’d have then.
What if the mother’s surname comes first, or there are two mothers or two fathers?
Everyone has two slots: the parent who gives the first surname and the one who gives the second. The father goes first by default; “Swap order” changes it for anyone in the tree. That covers the reversed order (allowed in Spain since 2017) and families with two mothers or two fathers.
How do I import my Ancestry or MyHeritage tree?
Ancestry: open your tree, go to “Tree settings” and click “Export tree”. When it’s ready, download the .ged file.
MyHeritage: in “Family tree”, open “Manage trees” and choose “Export to GEDCOM”. You’ll get a link to download it.
Then, in the app, tap “Import GEDCOM”, pick the file (the .ged, or Ancestry’s .zip as it is) and the person whose surnames you want. The tree is that person and their ancestors; the rest of the file is kept aside, in your browser, so you can switch to someone else at any time from Settings.
What’s changed since I imported my tree?
In trees imported from a GEDCOM file, the app notes everything you change after the import: the people you add (and whose father or mother they are), the details you correct (first name, surnames, sex, birth, place), the parent–child links you make or remove, and the people who leave the tree.
It helps you carry those changes to the genealogy program or website where your tree lives: most of them can’t merge a GEDCOM into a tree that already exists (they only upload it as a new tree, without your photos, hints or DNA matches), so changes go over by hand.
You’ll find it on the Cookie tab (“📝 N changes since the import”, only when there are some) and in Settings, next to the tree. Each change reads as an instruction, with the year of birth to find each person: make the change in your other tree and tap “✓ Done”. You can also copy the list or download it as a .txt.
The list comes from comparing your tree with how it was in the file, so a change you undo simply disappears. Swapping the order of the parents (who gives the first surname) doesn’t count, because other programs don’t keep that order. In trees imported before this feature, changes are noted from the first time you open the app with it.
If you’d rather start afresh, Settings lets you download the whole tree as GEDCOM and import it as a new tree wherever you like.
Can I build the tree by hand?
Yes. Start with yourself and work backwards: in the fan chart, each “+” adds the missing parent, with their first surname already filled in from the one they gave you.
Where does the rarity data come from?
From Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), which publishes how many residents carry each surname first, second and both. It covers surnames that at least 20 people carry first. If one of yours is missing, it is very rare in Spain or comes from abroad.
How many people share your first two surnames in that order is an estimate: the INE gives an exact figure only when both are the same (“García García”).
What is the Basque surname counter?
A game: it spots surnames that “sound Basque” by their shape (etxe, iturri, zubi, mendi, ‑aga, ‑eta, ‑tegi, tx, tz…). It isn’t etymology and can be wrong both ways.
Where is my data kept?
In your browser, encrypted. We have no server or database, and the GEDCOM file is read on your device, never uploaded. To have your trees on several devices, turn on Google Drive sync in Settings: it keeps an encrypted copy there that only you can open. You can also download a backup.