You’ve built a family tree with hundreds — maybe thousands — of names. But your ancestors are more than birth and death dates.
Who was alive during the American Revolution or the 1918 flu? Did my ancestors walk these streets?
Welcome to Witness.
Witness is not another tree builder. It is a discovery layer on the tree you’ve already built: import your GEDCOM and the raw data becomes a living family chronicle.
At the Stone: Photograph a headstone and Witness reads what’s carved, holding it against your tree — attach it to its person, file a research lead, or record the link the stone asserts; always your call. No signal at the graveside? Stones wait on the phone and send themselves later, and a saved copy of your tree answers with one bar or none.
Family Seats: Invite up to four family members to read the tree with you — each with their own account and place in the family, so Nearby, relationships, and the paper answer from where they stand. Address an invitation to a name or email — it shows who it waits for, finds its person at sign-in, and costs a member nothing; tapping it opens Witness itself. Working notes and the research desk stay yours alone.
Temporal Intelligence: “188 of your relatives were alive when the Mayflower landed” — every match labeled documented or probable, marked by how each relates to you.
The Daily Edition: Home is a small daily paper — a lead life in its historical moment, a curiosity from the Tree Check, one pattern your family made, fresh each morning.
The Family Stage: one household drawn as lifelines against falling time — sweep the years and watch ages, unions, and departures unfold.
The Portrait: Every person opens under four doors — Overview, Life & Times, Family, Sources. A compass on your direct line (“gen 7 · father’s side”), a birthplace that unfolds a small map in place, a ship’s badge for a confirmed crossing. Their story writes itself as one continuous read, drawn by AI from your record and period sources, labeled plainly, the record the authority.
Patterns in Your Family: where the family began, the moves it made, the oceans it crossed, and who turned out to be kin — one door, four findings.
Near Me & the Map: See who in your family has history within a mile of where you stand — your own people first — and the whole world of your tree on a map, era by era. Historic towns carry maps of their day, from the Library of Congress.
Tree Health: Twenty-two forensic data-integrity checks — the FTAnalyzer catalog — run over every person, family, and date, each one tap from the person it concerns.
Brick Walls: Witness analyzes your gaps and writes a structured Research Brief with suggested sources and archives.
In the National Archives: draft cards, naturalizations, and more, matched to your ancestors — awaiting your judgment.
The Crossing: Colonial shipping lists — the Mayflower and 104 more voyages, 6,296 passengers, 1607–1640 — held against your tree. A match arrives as a question with plain-words reasons; you decide. Confirmed, it becomes an immigration event, earns the ship’s badge, and opens the voyage’s roster of your people aboard. A small “?” explains every record; for later arrivals, FamilySearch and Ancestry open pre-filled.
In the Record Books: Historical registers held the same way, beginning with the Acadian deportation rolls — Grand-Pré, 1755, and the 1752 census. Questions, never verdicts.
Large Print, Day and Night: the whole paper set for older eyes, in daylight and a true dark-mode ink world.
Your Tree Stays Yours
Witness never touches the tree where it lives — Ancestry, FamilySearch, or anywhere else; what you record here stays in your Witness copy alone. Your GEDCOM is encrypted with a key created on your iPhone that never leaves it — we store your file but cannot read it, and your recovery code brings it back on any device.
Stop building. Start experiencing.
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