We build the memorial site you were going to build someday.
Lineage exists because almost every family has someone — a grandfather, a great-aunt — who spent years writing a memoir or drawing the family tree on butcher paper, and then it sat in a drawer. The materials are good. The technology to turn them into something a family can actually read, search, and contribute to has only just arrived.
What we believe
Family history belongs to the family. Not to a subscription site that owns your tree, not to a DNA company that owns your saliva, not to a CMS that gives you a blank page and a quote.
Public records should do most of the work. The US Census, the National Archives, the Library of Congress newspaper collection, FamilySearch — six billion records, free for genealogical use. The problem has never been the records. The problem has been that searching them well takes sustained attention and a librarian's instinct. AI is finally good enough to be that librarian.
And: the site should be alive. A memorial that nobody visits is not a memorial. A site relatives return to, contribute to, invite their kids to — that's what survives.
Who builds it
Lineage is a product of TheAIShop, a small studio that builds AI-augmented businesses for a living. We use the same research stack internally on our own family records — Lineage exists because the founder, after extracting his father-in-law's 1995 reminiscence, kept thinking: "every family should have this."
What we don't do
- We don't do DNA. No samples, no biometrics.
- We don't sell your data. We don't even have a path for that in our systems.
- We don't lock you in. Export your canonical data as JSON whenever you want.
- We don't run ads. The annual hosting fee is the entire business model.