The memoir, the family history book, the binder of life stories, the folder of scanned chapters — turned into something you can ask questions of. Answers show the page they came from. If your documents don't cover something, you're told so plainly, never given a guess.
The stories are written down. The people who could answer questions about them often aren't here to ask any more.
Most families already have the hard part done — a written history, a compiled binder, a scanned set of chapters. The problem is that nobody reads 300 pages to answer one question.
Life histories, compiled chapters, scanned typescripts. Your originals stay with you, untouched. What gets indexed is a copy, with living relatives' private details taken out first.
A family-tree file is optional. It adds answers about who's related to whom, and two of the games.
The text is broken into passages and tagged with who is speaking and which chapter it came from, so an answer can always be traced back to a specific place.
Type them the way you'd ask a relative — no special wording needed. Answers come back with their source attached — and the family photographs that go with them, where the book has them — so you can go and read the passage yourself.
What it isn't: a way to find ancestors you don't know about yet, or to build a public family tree. It works from what your family has already written down, and it doesn't speak for anyone — it shows you what they wrote.
A chatbot that sounds confident is easy. One you'd let a relative use, about real people, is a different thing entirely — and it's what this was built for.
If the source material doesn't cover something, the answer is “I don't know” — not a plausible guess. A family history that quietly invents a detail is worse than no answer at all, because nobody can tell which parts to trust.
Answers cite where they came from, so anything surprising can be checked against the original document rather than taken on faith.
People who are still living are treated differently from ancestors. For a living person, only the year of birth goes into the searchable copy. The full date isn't hidden when someone asks — it was never stored there in the first place.
It isn't traded, either. Rather than exchange your data for free hosting, I pay for hosting and infrastructure from established providers — the more expensive choice, made deliberately.
A way for children to meet their ancestors through the real record: their photographs, and the stories they and their families wrote down. Nothing is generated — every face and every line comes from your own documents.
The same app also runs four short games, built from your family's own photographs and stories: Who's in the photo?, Who did they marry?, Parents and children, and Whose story is it? A monthly scoreboard keeps the cousins competing.
Every round leads back to your family's own documents. One tap on “Learn about” asks about that person, and the answer arrives with its sources, just like any other question.
Shown with invented names and an illustration. In your family's games, the photographs and stories are real.
This isn't a product you can sign up for yet. It's a real, working system — a 347-page family history in six chapters, fully indexed and answering questions, with the family's photographs and family tree alongside — built to prove the approach before it's offered to anyone else. The live site is private to the family whose stories are in it, and a second family's is now being set up to test the process from the start.
I built this for my own family. We would often remember parts of a story and want more details, or wonder which ancestor a story was about. The book had the answers, but finding them was difficult. I found myself wishing my computer knew what was inside the book. Now it does. My family can ask any question and get an answer based on what's in the book — and if the book doesn't say, it tells them so instead of guessing. Answers from the book come with the page number and the passage itself, so anyone can check.
If you have a family history sitting in a binder or a folder of PDFs and you'd like it to be something people can actually ask questions of, I'd genuinely like to hear from you — including if you just want to know whether this would work for what you have.