Your family's documents, rendered as a site.
Not DNA. Not matching. The family you already have, finally rendered.
1891 Tree turns the box of family documents in your closet into a hosted family website — searchable, share-able, accessible, and built to outlast any single person's hard drive. You send us what you have (photos, certificates, the unpublished memoir, the family tree your aunt has been keeping for thirty years), we run it through the intake pipeline, and you get a real site at your own URL that members of the family can read on a phone.
The box in your closet, turned into a hosted family site.
The companion editor lets family members add corrections, photos, and stories without losing track of which version is canonical. The data underneath lives in a workbook the family owns — if you ever want to leave, you walk out with everything, in a format any spreadsheet can read.
Families with documents, and no good home for them.
Letters, photos, oral history, a partial family tree, a self-published book — and the relative who keeps saying "someone should do something with all this."
- Deaf families especially, where the documentary record is often richer and harder-won than the genealogy sites assume.
- Family historians who have outgrown PDFs and a shared drive but don't want to learn a genealogy app.
- Cultural organizations preserving a community's record.
Family history lives in three bad places.
A binder in a closet. A shared drive nobody else has access to. A head that will not last forever.
Existing tools either treat your family as a row in a database (the big genealogy sites) or assume you're a developer (the open-source generators). What's missing is the simple thing — a site, at a URL, that loads on the family group chat and stays up after the person who set it up stops paying attention.
You send us what you have. We surface a draft within a week.
You send us what you have, in whatever shape it's in. We extract the data — people, organizations, relationships, sources — into a structured form, and we surface a draft of your site within a week. You review. We iterate. You publish at a URL we host (or your own custom domain), and the family gets the link.
The site itself is hand-rolled, static, and fast. It loads on a cheap phone over hotel Wi-Fi.
Later, when you want it, the companion editor opens the site up for additions. Your cousin can submit a correction. Your aunt can attach the photo she just found. The editor proposes; you approve. The canonical record stays canonical.
A hosted site, the data underneath it, and the editor to keep it growing.
- A hosted family site at family.madeby1891.com/your-name (custom domain on the higher tier).
- A structured dataset of people, organizations, relationships, and sources, extracted from what you sent us.
- A search box that actually finds what you're looking for.
- Member access for the family, with as much or as little gating as you want.
- The editor for accepting member additions (Phase 2).
- Heirloom scanning available as an add-on for the boxes you can't ship.
Phase 1: white-glove intake. We're onboarding the first friendlies now.
The Mowl family is customer zero. If you have a family that would be a good fit, reach out and we'll talk scope.
Pricing TBD ahead of public launch.
The plan: a setup fee for the intake pipeline (the labor of turning your documents into a structured site), then a low monthly to host and maintain. Heirloom scanning priced separately by volume. Final numbers land before the first paid customer goes live.
Setup
TBD
One-time intake fee — labor of turning your documents into a structured site.
Hosting
TBD / mo
Low monthly to host and maintain.
Heirloom scanning
By volume
Add-on for the boxes you can't ship.
Phase 1 families negotiate scope at intake. Public numbers ship before the first paid customer goes live.
Large archive? Multi-branch family? Museum-grade exhibit?
If your family is large enough or your archive is rich enough to warrant a custom build — a multi-branch site, a museum-grade exhibit treatment, a deep-history integration with Deaf institutional archives — that's Studio Partner. Conversation-led. Quietly listed on product pages as 1891 Pro.
Family stories shouldn't depend on one person remembering to back up a hard drive.
The Mowl family has been documenting itself for five generations. The book Trailblazers in Our Deaf Families is the latest iteration. The site we built for ourselves first is the prototype for the one we'll build for yours.
Built in Frederick. Carried forward since 1891.