Terms of Service

These terms form an agreement between you and Valleon Technologies, the company that operates World Ancestry. By creating an account or using the platform you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account. We ask for your date of birth when you sign up and we do not create accounts below that age. If you are using World Ancestry on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms for it.

You are responsible for the security of your account and for everything done through it. Give accurate registration details, keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if you believe someone else has access.

One person, one account. Do not create an account under someone else's name or impersonate another person — creating a profile for a relative is a normal and expected part of the platform, but that is not the same as an account.

You keep ownership of everything you contribute — your writing, your photographs, your recordings, your research. We claim no ownership of it.

To run the platform we need permission to use it in specific ways. By contributing content, you grant Valleon Technologies a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, adapt in format, and display that content for the purpose of operating and improving the service, and to show it to the people your visibility settings allow. This licence exists only so the platform can function. It ends for new uses when you delete the content, subject to the backup periods described in our Privacy Policy.

You confirm that you have the right to contribute what you upload — that you own it, or have permission from whoever does, and that sharing it does not breach anyone else's rights.

Genealogical facts are not owned by anyone. A date of birth or a parent-child relationship is a fact. Your description of it, your research notes and your photographs are yours; the underlying facts remain available to other relatives documenting the same family.

A family tree is collaborative by design. Relatives may add to profiles you created, propose corrections, raise disputes, and merge duplicate people. This is the point of the platform, not a defect in it.

It follows that you cannot unilaterally erase a shared family record. If you close your account, your authorship is anonymised and your own profile is anonymised too, but relationships and profiles other relatives depend on generally remain. If you believe a specific record about you should be removed, contact us and we will deal with it under the Privacy Policy.

Do not use World Ancestry to:

• Enter information you know to be false, or fabricate relationships, evidence or documents.
• Harass, stalk, threaten or intimidate anyone, or use the platform to locate someone who does not want to be found.
• Publish another living person's contact details, medical information, religion, ethnicity or immigration status without their agreement.
• Upload material that is unlawful, hateful, sexually exploitative, or violent.
• Infringe copyright, or upload archive material you have no right to redistribute.
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-extract data from the platform, or attempt to re-identify people whose records are restricted.
• Probe, disrupt or circumvent the security of the service, or access accounts and records that are not yours.
• Resell access, or use the platform to build a competing dataset.

We would rather help you than enforce against you. But we may remove content, restrict features, or suspend or terminate an account that breaches these rules — immediately where there is risk to someone's safety.

Relationships on World Ancestry are marked Pending until the people they name confirm them. A confirmed relationship reflects the agreement of those parties — it is not a guarantee by us that a fact is historically correct, and you should not treat it as legal proof of descent, inheritance, citizenship or entitlement.

Disputes are reviewed by our moderation team, who weigh the accounts and evidence submitted and record an outcome with reasons. Decisions are made in good faith and we may revisit one if new evidence appears. Abuse of the dispute process — raising disputes to harass a relative rather than to correct a record — is itself a breach of these terms.

If you find content that breaches these terms, or a record about you that should not be there, report it from the record itself or email support@worldancestry.net. For copyright complaints, tell us what the work is, where it appears on the platform, and confirm you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.

We work to keep World Ancestry available and to preserve what you entrust to it, but we cannot promise uninterrupted service. We may add, change or withdraw features. Where a change would remove something you rely on or make your data harder to reach, we will give reasonable notice and a way to export your data first.

You may close your account at any time from your settings. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or where we are required to by law. Where the circumstances allow, we will tell you why and give you an opportunity to respond or to export your data.

World Ancestry is provided on an “as is” basis. Content on the platform is contributed by members. We do not warrant that any genealogical record is accurate, complete or fit for a legal, medical or official purpose, and you should not rely on it as such.

To the fullest extent the law permits, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of data, profit or opportunity. Our total liability arising from your use of the platform is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or GBP 100.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, you keep all the statutory rights your local law gives you.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it.

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and disputes are subject to the courts of England and Wales — except that, if you are a consumer, you may bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live and rely on that country's mandatory consumer protections.

We may update these terms. For material changes we will give notice in the application or by email before they take effect, and the date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.