Lineage
How Lineage works

From a box of letters to a published memorial site.

Most genealogy products hand you a CMS and a blank database. Lineage is the opposite — a built site, built with your documents, verified against public records, on your domain.

  1. Step 1
    Intake
    Day 1 · 30 minutes

    You sign up, choose a subdomain (something like lorenz, or lorenz-james), and upload whatever documents you have. There is no minimum and there are no formatting rules. PDFs, photographs of pages, scans of certificates, typewritten notes from a 1986 interview — all of it.

    What we do

    • Provision your subdomain at [slug].lineage.thegoodsite.co
    • Create a private workspace for your family

    What you do

    • Upload source documents
    • Tell us one thing — who in the family is alive and might object to being listed
  2. Step 2
    Extract
    Days 1–3

    Claude reads every document and produces structured data: people, places, marriages, events, stories, document provenance. Every fact is cited back to the page it came from. Conflicts (Aunt Carrie said 1889, Jim said 1884) are kept as conflicts — we never silently pick one.

    What we do

    • Run Claude vision over each document
    • Normalize into the canonical schema
    • Flag conflicts and gaps for later research
  3. Step 3
    Research
    Days 3–10

    Our research agent queries eight free archives in parallel — FamilySearch, NARA, Chronicling America, GeoNames, BillionGraves, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, WikiTree — for every person, place, and event in the extraction. Findings are filed and proposed as candidate facts. We never overwrite your data; we surface for your approval.

    What we do

    • Build query plans per person, place, and event
    • Run all adapters in parallel
    • Stage findings as candidate facts for your review
  4. Step 4
    Ask
    Days 10–14

    You receive a research queue: 'We can't verify Czaraholand exists, here are three possible modern equivalents. NARA shows a 1900 census entry that might be August — does the address match? Do you have a photo of Edward?' One question at a time, with everything we already know laid out alongside.

    What you do

    • Approve or reject candidate facts
    • Upload photographs as requested
    • Tell us what's wrong with our extractions
  5. Step 5
    Refine and publish
    Days 14–21

    Your answers feed back into canonical data with full version history. Once you toggle Publish, the site goes live at your subdomain. Tree, timeline, person pages, story view, place map, document gallery — all generated from the canonical data, all updated whenever the data changes.

    What we do

    • Render the memorial site
    • Configure your domain (subdomain or custom)
    • Send your first invitations
  6. Step 6
    Invite and grow
    Forever

    Invite the cousins. Each accepts by claiming who they are in the tree. Each can contribute to their branch and invite their own kids. Your annual hosting fee covers a fresh research pass every year — when archives release new records (and they always do), they get added to your site automatically.

    What we do

    • Re-query all archives annually
    • Process incoming contributions
    • Maintain version history

    What you do

    • Invite relatives
    • Moderate anonymous submissions

Ready to begin?

Most families start with a single PDF.