Lineage
A memorial site for your family

Hand us the box of letters and old photographs.We give your family a place that will outlast all of us.

Upload your memoirs, hand-drawn trees, and certificates. Within weeks, a beautiful site lives at your-family.lineage.thegoodsite.co — with stories your grandchildren can read, a tree they can wander, and facts independently verified against free public archives.

One-time build · Lifetime hosting · No ads, ever
August Lorenz
1855 – 1928 · Elkhart, Indiana
German army carpenter. New York Central foundry man. Spoke only German until the day he died.
01

Researched, not just published

We cross-reference every fact against FamilySearch, NARA, Chronicling America, and GeoNames — and tell you what we found, contradicted, or still can't prove.

02

Owned by you, forever

Your canonical data is exportable as JSON. Your site stays live as long as we exist. You can take everything with you.

03

Trusted by invitation

Only relatives you invite can contribute. Every fact has a chain of attribution. Vandalism is undone with one click.

Try it

Taste the research engine before you commit.

Type a family surname. We'll show a real sample of what the agent surfaces across the eight free archives we query for every Lineage family.

Taste the research engine before you commit

Type a family surname. See what the engine would find.

We'll show you a sample of the kinds of records, newspaper hits, and place resolutions our research agent surfaces for a real family.

Sample drawn from our canned examples for demonstration. The live engine queries FamilySearch, NARA, Chronicling America, GeoNames, BillionGraves, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and WikiTree in real time.

How it works

A finished site, not a blank workspace.

Most genealogy products hand you a CMS and wish you luck. We deliver a built site, built with your documents, verified against public records, on your domain.

  1. Step 1 · Intake

    Upload what you have

    Memoir PDFs, photographs of hand-drawn trees, scanned certificates, interview notes. Whatever the family kept in the box.

  2. Step 2 · Extract

    Claude reads every document

    We pull out structured data: people, places, marriages, events, stories, document provenance. Everything cited back to the page it came from.

  3. Step 3 · Research

    We query the free archives

    FamilySearch, NARA, Chronicling America, GeoNames, HathiTrust — six billion records, no subscription fees passed to you.

  4. Step 4 · Refine

    You answer what we can't

    We send back a punch list: 'we can't verify X, can you confirm Y, do you have a photo of Z.' One question at a time.

  5. Step 5 · Publish

    Your family site goes live

    your-family.lineage.thegoodsite.co — or your own custom domain. Tree, timeline, stories, photographs, places, documents.

  6. Step 6 · Grow

    Your relatives extend it

    Invite the cousins. Each one fills in their branch. The site improves every year as new public records are released.

The research engine

Eight free archives, queried automatically — for every person, place, and event in your family.

Our agent runs in the background after every intake. It finds the census record you didn't know existed, the newspaper notice from 1923, the headstone photograph volunteer-uploaded in 2019. Every finding cites its source.

See what the agent finds →
  • FamilySearch
    6B+ records. Vital, census, immigration, church.
  • NARA Catalog
    US Census 1790–1950, military, naturalization, ship manifests.
  • Chronicling America
    US newspapers 1789–1963 — obituaries, wedding notices, accidents.
  • GeoNames
    Modern coordinates for historical place names.
  • HathiTrust
    Out-of-copyright county histories and published genealogies.
  • BillionGraves
    Cemetery photographs and headstone transcriptions.
  • Internet Archive
    Books, photographs, regional histories.
  • WikiTree
    Collaborative 30M+ profile global tree, cross-referenced.
Why families do this

The instinct to preserve is older than the technology to do it well.

Every memoir, hand-drawn tree, and interview tape we receive opens with the same impulse. We didn't invent the urge. We built the tool that finally matches it.

"To print what I can remember about my life — it may be useful for some school history projects, or for your knowledge of our families."

James H. Lorenz
Opening line of his 1995 reminiscence. Now the source for the Lorenz family site.

"There is mention of a daughter who died as an infant. Herb thought she was born and buried in Germany, but Ella Marie said there was a girl's name on the family grave site at Grace Lawn cemetery in Elkhart."

Lorenz Family Notes
1986 interview with Herbert and Ella Marie. A research lead that became findable.

"Dad built this house around 1908; our deed on the land indicates it was part of an area bought from a chief of the Potowatomi Indians, who actually signed the deed with his mark."

Jim Lorenz
On 811 Oakland Avenue, Elkhart, Indiana. The kind of story that anchors a place page.
Live sites

Families already on Lineage.

lorenz.lineage.thegoodsite.co

The Lorenz Family

Five generations of the Lorenz line, from Czaraholand in lower Bavaria through Elkhart, Indiana, to a B-24 over Norfolk and a chemistry bench at Union Carbide. Written by Jim Lorenz, December 1995.

Visit the site →
hindman.lineage.thegoodsite.co

The Hindman Family

Twelve generations from Deacon Edmund Rice of Stanstead Suffolk (b. 1594, Sudbury Mass. settler 1638) through Sudbury, Westborough, Conway and Pittsfield, with a Revolutionary War patriot (Joseph Rice, DAR #A095016) and a Nova Scotia chapter (Ebenezer Rice Jr.), then into the Hindman line at La Salle Illinois by the marriage of Barbara Frances Rice (London 1912) to Boyden William Hindman, the 1945 Syracuse birth of William John 'Bill' Hindman, and his son Brant. Built from a hand-drawn Rice family tree, the William John Hindman NY birth certificate, the 1858 Ward genealogy with 1967 Edmund Rice Association supplement, WikiTree, Find a Grave, and FamilySearch persistent records K4XQ-925 and KJLF-98T.

Visit the site →
barnes-blair.lineage.thegoodsite.co

The Barnes & Blair Family

Five generations of the Barnes and Blair lines in Clay County and Macon County, Illinois, anchored on the marriage of Georgia Hope Blair (b. 1922, d. 1991) and Leland L. 'Bud' Barnes (b. 1922, d. 1982, WWII Coast Artillery Corps veteran with four Bronze Battle Stars from Normandy through Central Europe). The Blair line walks back through Garnet Othal Blair and Margaret Angeline Zink to Stephan Blair Sr. + Martha J. Walker. The Barnes line walks back through Ora J. 'Jay' Barnes and Bessie May Glasgow Barnes to James A. Barnes + Amanda Byrnes. Most of the family is buried at Iola Cemetery, Iola, Clay County, Illinois. Hope eventually remarried Robert Deister of Decatur and is buried at Graceland Cemetery, Decatur, alongside Robert and their daughter Jill.

Visit the site →
loso-arnholm.lineage.thegoodsite.co

The Loso / Arnholm Family

Three generations of central Vermont, anchored on Robert Fred Loso Sr. (Plainfield 1927, d. 2012) and Hope A. Arnholm Loso (Barre 1925, d. 2024), married at First Presbyterian Church of Barre on Hope's twenty-fifth birthday in 1950. Hope's father Charles Arthur Arnholm Sr. was born in Copenhagen Denmark in 1891; her maternal Trombly line is the anglicized French-Canadian Tremblay. Robert's Loso paternal line crosses Lake Champlain from Beekmantown New York, with the French-Canadian Beauval maiden name confirming its origin. The lineage descends through Kathie Loso MacInnes and Barry MacInnes to Kerrie MacInnes (partner of Jason Hindman), and to her daughter Pearl Hope Hindman, named for Hope. Built from Hope's 2024 obituary, Robert's 2012 Times Argus obituary preserved on Find a Grave, and thirteen Find a Grave memorials.

Visit the site →
Trust model

Every fact has a name attached.

Lineage is verified-and-viral by design. You invite the first relatives. Each accepts by claiming who they are in the tree. Each can invite their own cousins, siblings, kids. Every contribution carries the chain back to you.

  • Spearhead
    The family member who commissions the site. Validated at onboarding by us.
  • Validated members
    Invited by you. Contribute to their branch with their name attached.
  • Anonymous visitors
    See the public site. Submissions go to your moderation queue.
  • Revocation power
    Misuse? One click rolls back everything that member touched.
Begin

The longer you wait, the more you lose.

The aunt who knows the story is 86. The box of letters is in the attic. Start with whatever you have. We'll do the rest.

Not the right moment?

We'll write to you when the time makes sense. No newsletter, no funnel — just a single message when the timing fits.

Lineage — Memorial sites for families