thetruesammyjay/kinship

A graph-based kinship verification platform for ancestry tracing and marriage eligibility assessment in African communities. # Kinship Verification Framework A graph-based kinship verification platform for ancestry tracing and marriage eligibility assessment in African communities. The system digitizes family lineage records, models relationships as a graph, and runs a relationship-detection algorithm to flag consanguineous marriage risk before it happens. This repository is the proof-of-concept implementation supporting the research artifact: *"Design and Evaluation of a Kinship Verification Framework for Preventing Consanguineous Marriages in African Communities."* The scholarly contribution is the kinship verification framework and relationship-detection algorithm; the web platform below is the vehicle that demonstrates and evaluates it. ## Live Deployment - **Web application:** kinship-web-silk.vercel.app - **API documentation:** kinship-m1n0.onrender.com - **API health:** kinship-m1n0.onrender.com ## Table of Contents - Live Deployment - Problem and Motivation - Core Concepts - Architecture - Kinship Verification Algorithm - Tech Stack - Monorepo Structure - Data Model - API Overview - Evaluation Framework - Local Development - Deployment - Environment Variables - Roadmap ## Problem and Motivation Many African communities have historically relied on elders and oral tradition to determine family relationships before marriage. Migration, urbanization, displacement, and the erosion of oral record-keeping have weakened this mechanism, creating real risk that individuals unknowingly enter marriages with close relatives. Existing genealogy platforms (FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Ancestry, Gramps) are built for Western record structures and do not provide a culturally contextualized, graph-native kinship verification mechanism suited to African family and clan structures. No scalable digital framework currently exists for systematically storing lineage information and verifying kinship relationships within African communities. This project fills that …