Behind the scenes
Everything we’ve shipped, newest first — a young house building fast, and doing in weeks what the century-old sites never got around to. Each note is here for a reason.
Line your ancestors up by the decade they were born and you can watch the family shrink, generation by generation — the great demographic transition, drawn from your own tree. And the haunting counterpart: how many of your direct ancestors were only children, the narrow places your whole line squeezed through a single life. Free, under Insights.
The best name for a child is rarely on a trending list — it is already in your family, worn by someone who came before. So we read every given name in your tree, rank it against a century of American popularity, and surface the ones that were once beloved, are yours, and are rare today: meaningful and distinctive at once. Free, under Insights.
Two thin threads of your DNA — the Y your fathers passed down, the mitochondria your mothers did — ride almost unchanged for thousands of years. So it never made sense that you had to re-enter a haplogroup on every relative. Now a single test illuminates the entire line it belongs to: name one man’s Y-DNA and it settles onto his father, his grandfather, his sons and his brothers, exactly where it must be. Tested people glow solid; the rest are quietly marked as inherited. One cousin’s kit can light up a whole branch.
Testing is scattered across five companies, and cousins who should be comparing notes never discover one another. So we let you record the coordinates that matter — where a relative tested, their kit number, their haplogroups — right on their place in the tree. No raw DNA, no upload, no risk. Just the small facts that let family reach across the walls the testing companies put up.
Most genealogy “content” is thin filler written for search engines, or good material locked behind a subscription. We wanted the opposite: honest, unhurried essays on GEDCOM, DNA, and keeping your tree your own — including a field report of an AI quietly breaking a two-hundred-year brick wall over our API while its owner did something else.
Hiring a genealogist is dear, and a yearly plan is a commitment — but sometimes you only want one stubborn ancestor found. So we made it pay-as-you-go: for the price of a coffee or two, we research a single brick wall and hand back sourced findings you can drop straight into your tree.
A family tree that only honours the departed misses half the point. So it now nudges you three days before a relative’s birthday — and hands you a genuinely lovely card to send them, free. The same records that remember your ancestors can help you love the people still here.
The next era of genealogy is an assistant that does the digging for you. But that’s only safe if the tree is open and truly yours. So we shipped a clean REST API — included with any paid plan — that lets an AI agent read and responsibly extend your tree, with every change sourced. The agent does the searching; the findings live in a home you own.
A still photograph of someone long gone is precious, and strangely frozen. A few seconds of gentle movement — a glance, the hint of a smile — can undo you. For a few dollars, an old portrait stirs back to life.
The branches you’re missing live in your relatives’ memories, so the fastest way to grow a tree is to hand them the pen. But inviting an ex-spouse or a half-sibling’s mother shouldn’t expose the rest of your family to them. Now a one-tap invite comes with per-branch privacy: a co-parent sees only their own children and the line they married into — never anyone else’s.
There was only ever one of each of your ancestors. The old sites split them into thirty half-finished copies, one trapped in every private account. We rejoined them: a single shared, sourced record that grows richer as relatives add to it — while each family still sees the tree through its own branded House. Collaborative where that helps, private exactly where it should be.
Rival sites make you type “facts” into a form. But the facts are already sitting in your tree — the births of children, a marriage, an age at death. So each person’s panel now weaves those into a quiet timeline of their life, drawn entirely from what you’ve already entered. No busywork, and nothing invented.
Heraldry was a privilege of the powerful — but every family is a dynasty, and every dynasty deserves a mark. So we compose an original crest for your house and set it at the head of your tree and your public page. It is the kind of beauty the record-keepers never bothered to give ordinary families.
Somewhere out there, another family is tending the very branch you’re missing — the same ancestor, seen from the other side. We help you find those meeting points across trees, and we do it without ever exposing anyone’s living relatives. Discovery and privacy, at the same time.
A family’s story shouldn’t live on a page that vanishes the moment you stop paying. So you can publish your lineage at your own web address — yourname.dynasty.house — beautiful enough to be proud of, with living relatives kept private automatically. Somewhere your family will still be able to open in fifty years.
Genealogy has always been lonely, patient work. An AI that actually knows your tree changes that — answering your questions and drafting a life from a person’s real facts. The one rule we will never break: it extracts what the sources say and never invents what they don’t. A tree full of plausible fiction isn’t history; it’s a ghost story.
This is the belief the whole company is built on. The big sites lock your tree the moment you stop paying and make getting your data out deliberately painful. So on day one we made GEDCOM import take seconds and a complete export always one free click away — every person, date, place and note. If we ever stopped being the right home for your family, you could leave with everything.
A beautiful, honest home for your family tree goes live — built to last, built to be owned, and built on the conviction that the dead are a shared inheritance, not a product to be rented back to you.
This is just the beginning.
Every week, a little more of what the big sites never bothered to build.
Start your family tree — free