Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch — and 1891 Tree.
We’re not competing with the DNA companies. They find your ancestors. We help you understand the family you already have. Different shelf. Most of our customers use both.
| The DNA / records sites | 1891 Tree | |
|---|---|---|
| Promise | Find ancestors you didn’t know you had. | Understand the family you already have. |
| Input | DNA spit kit + public records. | The documents your family already wrote about itself. |
| Output | A pedigree tree + cousin matches. | A living website with people, places, and the threads between them. |
| Audience | Genealogy hobbyist. | Anyone who wants their kids and grandkids to know what their grandparents did for a living. |
| Editing | Hard. The tree is a graph; you fill cells. | An AI co-editor your aunt can use. |
| Privacy | Public by default. | Private by default. Public when you say so. |
| Cost shape | Subscription with paywalled records you don’t own. | Subscription with no paywalled records, because the records are yours. |
Use them together.
Most of our customers also use Ancestry or FamilySearch. Pull your facts from there, paste them into a document, upload it to us. We’ll turn the document into a site — the same way we’d turn a printed family history into a site.
The thing they can’t do.
Pick a school, an employer, or a church. See every family member who passed through it, with the years they were there, in one list. Click on a year to see the cohort. Click on the cohort to find friendships.
That’s the /relationships/ view, and it’s the reason this company exists. It doesn’t exist on the other sites because the other sites are built around the tree, not the institution. We’re built around both.
What we can’t do.
We don’t do DNA. We don’t do cross-family matching. We don’t have access to U.S. Census records or shipping manifests or the LDS vault of microfilm. If you don’t already know about an ancestor, we’re not going to find them for you.
That’s why most of our customers use both. The other sites find. We organize.
“We’re not the destination. We’re what you do with what you found at the destination.”