Frequently asked
questions

Genealogic is a collaborative family history platform. You build a structured family tree — persons, relationships, dates, places — and the platform's Origin AI layer places each ancestor in their historical context: what they lived through, what records document them, and what their daily life looked like. It goes beyond names and dates to tell the actual story.

Yes — the core platform is free forever. Free gives you up to 50 persons per tree, 5 AI document scans per month, GEDCOM import and export, and the full public Knowledge Graph search. Plus (€7.99/mo or €79.90/yr) unlocks unlimited persons and all Origin AI research. Family (€14.99/mo) adds 2 co-researchers per tree, unlimited archive matches, side-by-side edit review, photo-to-video animation, one Story Report per month, and an annual Family Archive PDF book. Details live on the pricing page.

Not at all. You can start with a single person — yourself, a parent, or a grandparent — and build outward. Each person you add gives Origin AI more to work with. Even a name, approximate birth year, and city is enough to surface relevant historical context and suggest which records to search for.

Yes. Genealogic supports GEDCOM import — the standard format used by Family Tree Maker, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gramps, and most other genealogy software. From inside your tree, click the import button and upload your .ged file. All persons and relationships are imported in seconds. You can then enrich each person with documents, photos, and Origin AI context.

Inside your tree view, click Add person to create a new entry. Fill in the name, dates, and places you know. Then use the relationship tools to link them as a parent, child, or partner of someone already in the tree. You can also add relationships directly from a person's full profile page. There's no minimum — a first name alone is enough to start.

Each person has: name (first name, last name, preferred/nickname), birth details (date, place), death details (date, place), occupation, gender, notes, and a profile photo. Dates accept full dates, years only, or approximate ranges ("circa 1880"). The more you fill in, the richer the Origin AI context becomes.

Yes. Genealogic is built for real-world complexity. A person can have multiple partners, children from different relationships, and be linked to adoptive as well as biological parents. The tree view shows all connections without flattening them into a simple chart. Every relationship is stored as a typed link so there's no ambiguity in the data.

Yes. You can create as many trees as you need — one per family line, one for each side of the family, or a combined tree. Each tree is independent and can have its own set of collaborators.

Origin is Genealogic's historical intelligence layer. When you open a person's profile, Origin surfaces contextual information: what the world looked like where they lived, what major events they would have lived through, what their occupation meant in their era, and what genealogical records are most likely to document them. It also answers open questions — type anything in plain language and Origin researches it.

No. Origin is designed to only surface documented historical fact. It provides historical context (what life was like in a place and time, which events occurred) rather than biographical claims about your specific ancestor. When uncertainty exists, it says so clearly. It does not generate fictional life stories or invent documents.

The public Origin search on the homepage is open to everyone — no account required. Ask about any place and era: "What was life like in Rotterdam in the 1940s?", "What happened to Jewish families in Amsterdam during WWII?", "What records exist for 19th century Irish emigrants?" Each result gets a permanent URL you can share or bookmark.

Origin combines the person's location, time period, and occupation to identify which record types were created and preserved for that context. A Dutch merchant in the 1850s will have different records than a French farmer in the 1780s. Origin specifies the relevant archives, collections, and date ranges — and over time, will link directly to digitised sources in partner archives like WieWasWie, FamilySearch, and Delpher.

It's Genealogic's open historical record index — tens of thousands of civil-register, birth, baptism, marriage and death records drawn from Wikidata, user-contributed GEDCOM files, and (in progress) European national archives. You can browse and search it free at /records without signing up. Every record has its own permanent URL indexed by Google. The dataset is published under CC-BY-SA-4.0 at /api/kg/manifest.

Open /records and filter by surname, place, year range, or record type. Click any row for the full record page (source, dates, family as recorded). If the record is one of your ancestors, click Claim this ancestor — it creates a new person in your family tree populated from the record's fields, with the source kept as a citation.

Yes. Every person page in your tree shows an Archive matches panel listing candidate records from the Knowledge Graph — matched on surname, first-name prefix, and a ±5-year birth window. Free sees up to 3 matches per person, Plus 20, Family and Archive 100. A green citation is kept back to the source record when you accept a match.

Wikidata coverage spans the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and a growing list of other countries (1750–1920 focus). GEDCOM imports can come from anywhere. We're actively expanding record counts; check the landing Archive block for a live total. Records that need a commercial partnership (FamilySearch, WieWasWie's premium layer) are not yet included.

You can upload any image or PDF: birth certificates, death certificates, marriage records, census pages, military papers, newspaper clippings, letters, and photos. Genealogic stores the file and, for typed or legible documents, runs AI analysis to extract structured data — names, dates, places, and the roles of everyone mentioned.

The analysis extracts: document date and place, a one-paragraph summary, and a structured list of all persons mentioned with their roles (subject, parent, witness, spouse, etc.) and any occupations noted. Extracted facts are shown inline in the person's panel so you can see evidence without opening the file. A confidence indicator flags results that may need human review.

Yes. Documents are stored encrypted in private cloud storage (AWS S3) and are only accessible to you and any collaborators you explicitly invite to the tree. Documents are never shared publicly or used to train AI models.

Yes, on the Family tier and above. From inside any tree you can generate an invite link or send an email invitation. Collaborators can be given editor access (can add and change persons) or viewer access (read-only). Family allows up to 2 co-researchers per tree; Archive is uncapped. Invite links are valid for 7 days; you can revoke access or change roles at any time.

A Family-tier feature. When a collaborator proposes a change to a person already in the tree, you see the current value and the suggested value next to each other before accepting. Nothing overwrites silently — you decide per field what to keep.

Any collaborator can submit a suggested change on a person's profile. The tree owner reviews it and decides whether to accept or decline. This keeps the tree from being edited conflictingly — all proposed changes are visible, tracked, and never silently applied. Nothing overwrites existing data without approval.

Worlds are curated, immersive historical takeovers — Rotterdam under occupation 1940–45, The Watersnoodramp of 1953, The Limburg coal mines, The Dust Bowl, and more. When a person in your tree overlaps a World by place and era, they're matched automatically. The takeover pulls together a narrative, period images, your uploaded documents interleaved by date, real newspaper snippets from Delpher, and prompts to fill in missing facts about your ancestor.

A Leaflet map of every place your tree touches, with a time slider and event-type colours. Each person's birth and death places feed the map directly — you don't need to upload a document to see them pinned. Places are geocoded via Nominatim on ingest and scoped to country code, so matching is authoritative beyond the Netherlands.

My Journey is your personal quest list — the single highest-leverage next action per person, ranked. Examples: unlock a World by adding a birth place, link an extracted entity to a real person in your tree, upload a document, enter a World. The sidebar shows a live count; "Can't resolve" dismissals persist across sessions.

A Story Report is a 15–20-page PDF biography of one person in your tree. It combines the profile, family section, AI-generated historical context, life story, timeline, Lived through events, Their worlds capsule excerpts, Delpher newspaper snippets from their time and town, primary sources, and a section on what remains unknown. Available as a one-off purchase for €9.99, or free (1 per calendar month) on the Family tier.

A Family-tier perk: one PDF book of your entire tree, every 30 days. Generated on demand, delivered as a signed download link. Think of it as a quarterly family yearbook you can print, share, or keep as a backup.

Yes — on the Family and Archive tiers. Upload a portrait and the Higgsfield engine generates a short lifelike animation (subtle head turn, smile, a historic-wind preset). The video is stored in your private S3 bucket and attached to the person alongside the source photo.

Yes. Genealogic automatically identifies living persons (those born after 1920 without a recorded death) and treats them as private by default. Their names appear in public search only as "Private record" — no dates, places, or personal details are shown. You control who can access the full data through your tree's collaborator settings.

Tree data and documents are stored on servers in the EU (PostgreSQL database on a European VPS, files on AWS S3 in the eu-central-1 region). Genealogic complies with GDPR. You can request a full export or deletion of your data at any time by contacting hello@genealogic.ai.

No. Your tree data and documents are never used to train AI models. AI features use your data only to generate responses for you in the moment, and those responses are not stored or shared. The public Origin search cache stores anonymised query results (e.g. "life in Rotterdam in the 1940s") — no personal family data is ever part of the public layer.