Privacy, in plain terms.
Your tree stays in your browser. Our server keeps two things only, unless you share a tree: research requests you send, and a short cache of record searches. Nothing is sold.
What your browser stores
People, sources, photos and your undo history are saved in your browser's own storage on this device. They are not uploaded. Clearing this site's data deletes them, so export a copy now and then.
What our server stores
- Research requests. If you send the research form, we keep one row: your name, email, what you know, your goal, the time, and the network address and browser it came from. A person reads it to reply. It is used for nothing else.
- A record search cache. When you search records, our server asks the public archive and keeps its answer for 7 days so a repeat search is quick. It holds the search words and the archive's reply, not who asked.
That is all, unless you share a tree. No accounts and no profiles.
If you share a tree
A shared tree lives on our server so family can see it. For each shared tree we keep:
- The tree. People, families, events, places and sources, and every change made to them.
- Link tokens. The long random code in each link, who it came from, and when it was last opened.
- Typed names. The name each person types once, so the family sees who added what.
- Uploaded files. Photos and papers sent in, up to 8 MB each.
- Proposals. What family members suggest, and whether the custodian accepted it.
- A chat count. For each Ask message: when it was sent, which link sent it, and how long it was. Not the words.
Never stored, for a shared tree or anything else: an email address, a password, or payment details. The custodian can turn off any link and delete the whole shared tree, files included, any time.
Ask, the chat
When you use Ask on a shared tree, your message and the parts of the tree you are allowed to see are sent to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude model, to be answered. The site does not keep your message or the answer, only a count. Nothing you send is used to train anything. Anthropic's commercial terms say: Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services.
(anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms, read on 7 October 2026.)
Analytics
This site uses Google Analytics 4. It records the pages you visit, how you arrived, your browser and device type, a rough location worked out from your IP address, and a random ID kept in a cookie. It never sees your tree.
Record search
Searches go to free public archives: the Library of Congress, Open Archives and Wikidata. They see the search words, not your tree.