Verified, not asserted
A relationship on World Ancestry is not true because one person typed it. It becomes confirmed when the people it names agree, and it can be disputed when they do not.
About us
Most of the world's family history was never written down.
Genealogy platforms were built around national archives — census returns, parish registers, immigration manifests. That works if your ancestors lived somewhere that kept those records and counted your family as people worth recording. For most of humanity, neither was true.
World Ancestry starts from the opposite assumption: that the record lives with the family, and that the way to make it trustworthy is to let the family confirm it together.
What we believe
Built for oral history
Most genealogy software assumes a birth certificate. Much of the world's family history lives in memory, naming ceremonies and community record. We treat those as first-class evidence.
Your record stays yours
You control who sees each section of a profile, you can withdraw your own data, and we do not sell it. Privacy settings are per-section, not one blunt switch.
Dignity over data volume
We would rather hold ten million profiles families recognise as accurate than a hundred million nobody trusts. Depth over breadth, always.
How that shapes the product
These are not marketing lines — each one corresponds to something you can see in the software.
See how verification works- Naming traditions are not edge cases
- Patronymics, compound surnames, maiden and married names, praise names, clan names and names that change at initiation or marriage are all supported directly — not squeezed into a first/last pair.
- The living have a say
- Anyone can be added to a tree by a relative, but a living person can claim their own profile, correct it, restrict it, or ask to be removed from public view entirely.
- Disagreement is data
- When two branches of a family remember something differently, we record the dispute rather than silently picking a winner. Reviewers see both accounts and the evidence behind each.
Who builds this
World Ancestry is made by a small team of engineers, genealogists and archivists who kept running into the same wall: the tools assumed a family history that had already been written down by someone else.
We work closely with the families using the platform. If something about your family structure does not fit, that is a gap in our model, not in your family — and we want to hear about it.
“We are the ancestors of the future. What we preserve today becomes someone's identity tomorrow.”
Families first
Stories, not rows
Every tradition