The Academy

Family history, done right.

Plain-English guides and honest essays on genealogy — building your tree, understanding GEDCOM, and keeping your family's story free and yours forever.

6 min read

The Baby Names Hiding in Your Family Tree

The best name for your child probably is not on any trending list — it is already in your family, worn by someone who came before. How to find the meaningful-but-rare names hiding in your own tree, ranked against a century of popularity.

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7 min read

How Many Children Did Your Ancestors Have?

Line your family up by the century it was born and you can watch something quietly enormous: the family shrinks. The demographic story told through your own tree — and the only-children your line barely survived through.

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10 min read

Reading the Unreadable: How AI Broke a 200-Year Brick Wall

A field report from a real research session: handing two-century-old church registers to a vision AI, letting it read the handwriting, and writing the findings back into a tree over an open API. The wins, the wrong turns, the false friends, and a brother the records had forgotten.

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7 min read

How Dynasty House Is Different From the Other Family Tree Sites

An honest comparison of Dynasty House against Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, Geni and Gramps — on ownership, pricing, privacy, design and AI. What we do that no one else does, and where the big sites still win.

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7 min read

The Family Tree an AI Can Actually Help You Build

Genealogy is about to change. When an AI agent can research your ancestors and write the findings straight into a tree you own — over an open API, with sources and privacy intact — the family tree stops being a filing cabinet and becomes a living thing.

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8 min read

There Was Only Ever One of Them

The big genealogy sites keep a separate copy of your great-grandfather in every tree he appears in, each one slightly wrong. We do the opposite: one canonical record per real person, connected across families and corrected by everyone who descends from them. Here is why that changes what a family tree can be.

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12 min read

Your AI Genealogist Needs a Home: AI, Genealogy, and the Family Tree API

AI agents are about to make finding ancestors easy. The hard part becomes keeping them: a permanent, private, portable place no single app or company can hold hostage. A deep look at agentic genealogy, why the storage and presentation layer is where family history is won, and how a family tree API lets your AI do the digging while you keep the result.

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13 min read

The Thread and the Cloud: What Your DNA Keeps, and What It Throws Away

Most of your DNA is erased from your descendants within a few centuries — yet two thin strands ride almost untouched for four thousand years. Why your Y-chromosome and mitochondrial line outlast the rest of your genome, and how Dynasty House shows it on your tree.

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6 min read

Your Place in the Line: The Lineage Certificate

Pick any ancestor — a great-great-grandmother, a distant cousin, a medieval forebear — and Dynasty House draws the unbroken chain of descent all the way down to you, on a certificate you can print and share.

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10 min read

One Family, Many Homes: How a Whole Family Can Tend a Single Living Tree

Why every genealogy site makes five cousins rebuild the same tree five times — and how Dynasty House does the opposite: one canonical family tree, a beautiful House for every branch, and a record that grows richer while you sleep.

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8 min read

The New Science of Ancient DNA: How Archaeogenetics Is Rewriting Family History

Y-chromosome haplogroups, ancient burials, and consumer DNA tests are connecting living people to medieval ancestors. A grounded look at what the science can — and cannot — tell you.

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6 min read

Why a Beautiful Family Tree Matters: Visualization and the Family Story

A family tree is a way of seeing. How thoughtful visualization — pedigree charts, fan charts, photos and crests — turns a list of names into something people actually feel.

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7 min read

Choosing a Family-Tree Platform: An Honest Checklist

Records, DNA, design, price, and the question nobody asks until it’s too late: what happens to your tree if you stop paying? A practical buyer’s checklist.

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8 min read

How to Start a Family Tree: A Beginner’s Guide

You don’t need to be a historian to begin. A simple, encouraging guide to starting your family tree this weekend — from one name to a living dynasty.

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7 min read

Why People Are Leaving MyHeritage — and What to Look for in an Alternative

The renewal price shock, the read-only "tree ransom," and the upsell fatigue driving genealogists to seek a calmer, more honest home for their family tree.

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Guides & how-tos

Plain-English references on GEDCOM and moving your tree.