Questions, answered.

A paid service that turns your family’s pile of paper into a living family website. You send us PDFs, scanned books, photo-back captions, typed transcripts, or oral-history notes. We extract the people, places, and connections; we stand the site up; we host it; we give your family an editor so the site keeps growing. Private by default. You own your data, always.

Those services find ancestors you didn’t know you had — DNA matches, record hits, hints. We do the opposite: we take the family you already know about and turn it into a site that everyone in the family can actually use. Different shelf. Most of our customers use both.

No. We don’t collect, store, or match DNA. If a customer pastes a DNA-match list into a document, we treat it as text data; we will not contact a matched person on the customer’s behalf.

1891 Tree was built by a Deaf family, and the flagship example is the Mowl Tree. We are not Deaf-only. We do understand the institutions — residential schools, Deaf churches, clubs, fraternal organizations — that show up across Deaf-family histories, and our schema models them as first-class places.

You don’t need one. Most customers send a mix: a few PDFs of obituaries, photo albums with captions on the back, a typed list of names a relative kept in a notebook, a church directory. Words are what we need; photos alone aren’t enough. If you have very thin material, we’ll tell you before we charge the setup fee.

PDF, DOCX, TXT, RTF, JPG, PNG, HEIC, and ZIPs of the above. If your material is on paper, mail it to us with the heirloom-scanning option.

Five business days for the standard plan, two for Heritage. The bottleneck is the human accuracy pass — we read every document a person reads before the site goes up. We will never beat that SLA by skipping that step.

We tell you. If a 14-day review of your material shows it’s too thin or unreadable to make a site we’d stand behind, we refund the setup fee and explain what would help.

Yes. Every new family site is private by default. The source documents you upload are never published — only the structured data is rendered, and only the people you invite can see the site. You can flip the site to public in one click; you can flip it back the same way.

Yes. You invite family members by email from your dashboard. Each invitee gets their own magic-link login. Three roles: Owner (you), Editor (full edit), Reader (view-only). Tree and Heritage allow multiple Editors; Sapling is limited to three editors.

On Tree and Heritage. Sapling is private only. When you flip to public, living relatives marked “hide on public” stay hidden no matter what — that’s a per-profile override the family member controls.

Yes. Default-private at the site level. Per-profile override at the person level. Family members can flag their own profile for redaction at any time, and we honor it instantly.

Always. Every account has a one-click export that produces a ZIP containing the site HTML, the family Sheet as CSV, the source documents you uploaded, and the full change log. No friction, no retention windows, no holding your data hostage. It’s your family.

Because the AI doesn’t save things. It proposes changes; you approve them. Every approved change is anchored to a source quote from a document you supplied, and every change writes a row to the audit log. The buttons are Suggest and Apply, not Save.

It tries hard not to, and if it ever does, the audit log makes it correctable. The editor is source-anchored: when the AI writes a sentence, it cites the document and quote it pulled from. If a fact doesn’t have a source, the editor flags the suggestion and asks you for one before applying.

From the billing page in your dashboard. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current paid period. Your site stays live through that period and then becomes read-only for 30 days, during which you can export or resume.

End of paid period: read-only banner appears. After 30 read-only days: site goes offline. After 60 days: source documents and the family Sheet are deleted. You can export the full ZIP at any point in that window.

Because a human reads your documents before the site goes up. That human pass is where the accuracy lives, and it’s the line between us and a one-click AI site builder. The setup fee covers about ninety minutes of admin time and filters out customers we can’t help.

Never automatically. If you hit a limit, we email you and surface a banner; nothing is charged until you choose. Surprise charges are a trust-killer.