We build the family site you always meant to make.
Almost every family has someone, a grandfather, a great-aunt, who spent years writing a memoir or drawing the family tree on butcher paper. Then it sat in a drawer. The materials are good. What was missing was an easy way to turn them into something the whole family can actually read, search, and add to. That's what we do.
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.