About Know My Family
A simple, free way to map your family — built for normal people, not professional genealogists.
Why this site exists
I built Know My Family because every other family tree tool I tried was either expensive, ad-cluttered, locked behind a subscription, or designed for someone submitting microfiche to a national archive. I wanted something I could open on my phone, drag my grandfather into place, snap a photo of an old polaroid, and share with my mom — without filing a tax return first.
So this is what came out: a free family tree builder you can use anonymously, sign into with Google when you want your tree to follow you across devices, and share with relatives via a 24-hour edit link. No ads, no upsells, no "premium" tier. Build a tree. That's it.
What we believe
- Your tree is yours. Names, dates, photos — they stay on your device unless you sign in, and even then only on a server keyed by a hash of your email. See the privacy policy for the unsanitized version.
- No ads, no trackers. Not now, not later. The site is small and cheap enough to run that nobody needs to be sold to.
- Sharing should be easy and temporary. A share link is a 24-hour capability, not a permanent permission. When it expires, it expires.
- Mobile-first, but desktop-honest. The tree pinches, drags, and prints on both. Nothing is gated behind a phone-only app.
A brief history of family trees
People have been drawing family trees for as long as people have had ancestors to remember. The earliest written genealogies appear in Sumerian king-lists from the third millennium BCE. The Hebrew Bible spends entire chapters tracing lineage. Roman patrician families kept wax masks of their ancestors on display in their homes.
The visual tree we recognize today — a real diagram with branches and connecting lines — comes from medieval European heraldry. By the 15th century, noble families were commissioning elaborate hand-painted "stemmata" (literally, garlands) on parchment to certify their bloodlines. The conventions of putting parents above, children below, and spouses side-by-side were largely settled by the 1500s and haven't changed much since.
In the 20th century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quietly built the largest genealogy archive in the world — microfilming birth and marriage records from around the globe and consolidating them in a vault inside a granite mountain in Utah. Most of those records are now searchable online for free at FamilySearch.org.
And in the last twenty years, consumer DNA tests have turned genealogy from a paper hobby into a science. 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and others can connect long-lost cousins, identify ethnic origins, and (occasionally) surface family stories that nobody told you.
Tips for getting started
- Start with what you know. Yourself, your parents, your grandparents. Build outward. Don't try to leap to the 1800s on day one.
- Interview the oldest living relative first. Memory is perishable. Ask about names, dates, places — and also about the stories. The stories are why you're doing this.
- Capture faces. A name with a portrait is a person. A name without one is a row in a spreadsheet. Snap photos of old prints before they fade further.
- Approximate dates are fine. "Around 1920" is more useful than blank. You can sharpen later.
- Use the Export button. Your tree is yours; save a copy. JSON files don't expire.