Validated by invitation, all the way down.
The most important design decision in Lineage is that every contributor is validated by an invitation from someone already validated. This is what keeps the data trustworthy and what makes the product grow naturally along the edges of real families.
The chain
- Spearhead — the family member who commissions the site. Validated at onboarding by us.
- Validated members — invited by the spearhead. Each accepts by claiming a relationship to a named person in the tree. Each can invite their own relatives, extending the chain by one edge.
- Anonymous visitors — see the public site. Cannot edit. Submissions go to a moderation queue.
What validated members can do
- Read the full family data (including non-public fields they have permission for).
- Contribute directly to people in their branch with version history.
- Invite their own kids, siblings, cousins.
What only the spearhead can do
- Revoke a member's access.
- Roll back all contributions a member made.
- Toggle publish state of the site.
- Export or delete the family workspace.
Living people
Anyone marked as living shows only fields the spearhead explicitly approves. Default disclosure: first name, generational relationship. No birth year, no contact info, no photo. Living members can override their own privacy.
The detective integration
Lineage uses our in-house /detective skill in narrow modes only — and never to surface unknown people. A validated member who wants to invite their cousin Bob can use detective in contact-discovery mode with Bob's name and last-known city. Bob receives an invitation, can decline, and every detective invocation is logged for the spearhead to review.
Permitted modes: contact-discovery (for known relatives), obituary-search, memorial-page lookup, newspaper coverage. Living-person lookups require explicit spearhead consent per individual.
Your data, your ownership
- Export canonical data as JSON at any time.
- Delete the family workspace at any time (30-day soft delete before hard delete).
- No third-party data sales, ever.
- No AI training on your family content without explicit opt-in.