Know where you belong.
the big family is a private archive your family builds together — the people, the places, the stories and the connections that made you who you are, kept in the words of the people who lived them.
It is not a genealogy database looking for one correct version of your family, and it is not a social network. It is somewhere your relatives can each write down the part they remember, find out what they didn’t know, and have all of it still be there in fifty years.
What we hold to
- Private by default.
One family’s archive can never be read by another. Nothing here is public, nothing is indexed, and no record is shared outside your family unless your family chooses to share it.
- Your family as you know it to be true.
Names spelled your way, with every mark that belongs on them. Relationships as you know them. Dates as precisely as you actually know them — a year is fine, and so is “sometime in the sixties”. We would rather hold what is true than what is tidy.
- Nothing is ever lost, except by your own choice to erase.
Correcting something keeps the earlier version in the record rather than overwriting it, so a family’s changes of mind are part of its history too. Erasing a person is the one true deletion in the whole product, and only the person themselves or a steward can ask for it.
- Every fact names who recorded it.
Beside each fact is the relative who entered it. A family archive is a collection of people’s memories, and knowing whose memory you are reading is part of the fact.
- Each person decides what is shared about them.
When you join, you are asked about your own details one at a time, and you choose who sees each answer. You can change any of those answers, and who can see them, at any time.
Why we built this
this started with a family WhatsApp group, like many families have, called ‘the big family’.
mostly it’s birthday messages, anniversaries and photos. then one day, someone wished my 100-year-old great uncle a happy birthday. I realised I knew almost nothing about him.
an older cousin was in town and filled in the gaps. he was my grandma’s brother and, as it turns out, the first physiotherapist in Nigeria. how wild.
it made me realise how much of my family’s history exists only in someone’s head.
not secrets. just ordinary things. where someone was from. what they did. how two people met. why a name is spelled a certain way.
things that are perfectly safe until the person who knows them is gone.
I realised I didn’t want another genealogy database. families don’t have one version of their history. they have a mother’s version, an uncle’s version, a story someone remembers differently. they’re all worth keeping.
I wanted somewhere my family could record what they know, in their own words, and know it would still be there in fifty years.
so that’s what I built.
now my kids have a durable record of where they come from, and they know their great uncle’s story.
an archive for my own family, built carefully enough that I’d trust it with yours.
Féz
Questions families ask first
Who can see what my family records?
The relatives a record actually concerns — not simply everyone who has been let into the archive.
Everyone in your archive can see the shape of the family: who is in it, their names, and how they connect. The substance — facts, stories, photos and the history of changes — is shared with the relatives it belongs to: the people who share an ancestor with that person, or who are married to someone who does. So inviting a cousin from one side of your family does not hand them the other side, and it does not hand them your in-laws.
On top of that, every fact carries the visibility its subject chose: shared with the family, shared with the family’s stewards only, or kept to themselves. “Only me” means only them — not even a steward can read it.
Is it private?
Yes, and not as a setting you have to find. One family’s archive can never be read by another, and that is enforced inside the database itself on every single read — not by the app remembering to check.
Photos are kept in private storage. They are never served from a public address: each viewer is handed their own link, minted for them at the moment they open the page and good only for a short while afterwards.
The one crossing between families is one you make deliberately. Two archives can be linked across a marriage, and even then each side sees only a narrow slice of the other — relatives who have passed, plus anyone explicitly shared. Living relatives do not cross a link on their own.
What if someone in my family already started an archive?
Then join theirs rather than beginning a second one. Any member can share a family code — the sort of thing that gets pasted into the family group chat — and anyone holding it can ask to join. If you know the archive’s address but nobody has sent you a code, you can ask its stewards from there instead.
Either way, a steward saying yes is the only way in. A code by itself admits nobody, and it only ever makes an ordinary member, never a steward.
And if two archives do get started for the same family, they are never melted into one. They are linked — each keeps its own stewards, its own records and its own history.
Can I get my family’s data out?
Yes, and nobody has to approve it. Your family tree comes out as a GEDCOM file — the standard format that every other genealogy tool can open.
Your own record comes out as a second file: your names, your facts, your stories and photos, who can see each fact, and, for each fact, the relative who entered it. That one becomes available as soon as your own profile is confirmed, which is simply the point at which there is a record to hand you. Everything in it is on screen too, whether or not you ever download anything.
Both are built through your own permissions, so a download contains exactly what you can already see and nothing more.
What happens if someone wants their record gone?
It goes — properly. Erasure removes the person, their names and facts, the actual photo files, and the change history that would otherwise still hold the old values. What is left behind is only a note that an erasure happened, carrying nothing about who it was.
The person themselves can do it, and so can a steward. It cannot be undone, and the archive says exactly that before you confirm. It is the one true deletion in the entire product.
What does it cost?
Free to start. We have not settled anything beyond that yet, and we would rather tell you so than quote you a price we have not decided.
Do you use our family’s content to train AI?
No. Never. Your family’s names, stories, photos and facts are not training data — not for us, and not for anyone we work with. We do not sell them, we do not move them between families, and nothing your family writes down is used to improve a model.