Family history services
Your Family History, Online and Your Own
Most families have a story scattered across a dozen places: a family tree on Ancestry, a box of photographs, a Bible with names written inside the cover, an obituary clipped from the paper, a cousin who has done years of research. I can help you bring it all together into a family history website of your own, built the same way as Malott.net.
How Malott.net was built
This site is the model. It began with an old family tree file, an out-of-date website and decades of photos, letters and records that relatives and fellow researchers had sent me. Over a few weeks, working with AI tools under my own direction, that became the site you are reading. Along the way we:
Rebuilt the family tree
Turned a family tree file into a page for every person, with their dates, places, parents, spouses and children, and a family tree you can browse from the first ancestor to the present.
Read and checked the records
Transcribed census pages, marriage records, draft cards, Revolutionary War pension files, wills and church registers, and checked each one against everything else known about the family.
Told the stories
Wrote illustrated articles on the family’s history, from a Huguenot refugee’s crossing in 1662 to a captivity on the Ohio River, drawn from the sources and written for family members, not specialists.
Gathered the photos and headstones
Scanned, captioned and credited family photographs, documents and gravestones, with a gallery listing where every image came from.
Mapped the places
Drew maps of where the family lived, travelled and is buried, and pinned old land records to the ground they describe today.
Flagged what is uncertain
Wrote research notes wherever the records disagree, so that nothing doubtful is presented as fact, and so that relatives know where help is needed.
Built tools for visitors
Added a search box, a family timeline and the Cousin Connector, which shows how any two people on the site are related.
Protected the living
Kept living people off the site entirely, and left out anything the family asked to keep private.
Start from whatever you have
You do not need to have everything organized before we begin. Most projects start from one or more of these:
- a family tree on Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage or another service, exported as a GEDCOM file (I can show you how)
- a family tree program on your computer, or a printed family history
- boxes of photographs, letters, certificates, newspaper clippings or a family Bible
- an old family website that has gone out of date or offline
- the research of a relative who has passed away, which deserves not to be lost
From that starting point we build outward: filling in gaps from public records, checking what you have against the sources, and turning names and dates into the stories of real people.
Far less than a subscription
Ancestry and similar services are wonderful research tools, and I use them myself; many of the records on this site were found there. But a subscription is a research tool, not a way to share your family’s story. Your tree on Ancestry is seen mainly by other Ancestry members, and keeping access to your work means keeping your subscription.
A family history website is different. Once it is built, it belongs to you, anyone can read it with no account or password, and it costs very little to keep online. You do not need an active Ancestry account to share your family history with the world.
| A research subscription | Your own family history site | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to keep | An ongoing subscription, renewed every year | A one-time project, then only the cost of a web address and simple hosting, often a few dollars a month or less |
| Who can see it | Mainly other members of the service | Anyone, anywhere, with no account needed |
| What it shows | Names, dates and attached records in the service’s format | Your family’s stories, photos, documents, maps and research notes, presented the way you want |
| Who owns it | Stored on the service, under its terms | Yours: plain web pages you can keep, move or hand down |
| Best used for | Searching records and finding new ancestors | Sharing what you have found, and keeping it for the next generation |
The two work best together: we use the research services to gather and check the information, and your own site to share it.
How it works
- A conversation. We talk about your family, what you already have, and what you would like the site to do.
- Gathering. You send what you have: a tree file, scans, photos, stories. I can help with scanning and exporting.
- Building and checking. I build the site, check the facts against the records, and write up the stories and the open questions.
- Your review. You and your family review everything before it goes online. Nothing about living people is published, and nothing goes up that you want kept private.
- Going live, and growing. The site goes online at its own address, and new discoveries can be added as they come in.
The person behind the work
As I explain on the About page, AI is a remarkable tool for organizing records and spotting where they agree and disagree, but it takes a person to guide it, check it and decide what is true. Every site I build gets the same care as this one: every fact checked against the sources, every conflict shown openly, and every image created with AI clearly labeled.
Interested? I would be glad to hear about your family and talk about what is possible. Get in touch.