WitnessLives

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 Revolution or the 1918 flu? Did they 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, or read your branch of FamilySearch Family Tree, and it becomes a living family chronicle. Four tabs: Today, Sections, Family, Map. Step into the Hearth: on iPad and in the browser, a household from your tree, built for its time and place — the house, its furnishings, the clothes, the family moving through its years — while a narrator tells the household’s story from the record in a recorded voice. Today brings you one household at a time across the year. Early work, and it says so: a feedback link sits under it. Today: a small daily paper — a lead life in its historical moment, what falls on this day, one line from a founder to you, a household, a record worth checking — fresh each morning. Sections: the one index. World & Nation; Family Structure and Where They Lived; the Library’s 45 ready-made questions, each answered from your own tree; and, for the tree’s owner, Tree Hygiene. Family: every household in your tree, by time, name or place — and the Family Graph, one household drawn as lifelines: sweep the years and watch ages, unions and departures unfold. The Portrait: every person under four doors — Overview, Life & Times, Family, Sources. The facts as labeled rows, each place named by the record that holds it, a map that zooms, your own notes kept apart, and records that might name this person printed in full. Their story reads as one piece, drawn by AI from your record and period sources, labeled plainly, the record the authority. 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. At the Stone: photograph a headstone and Witness reads what’s carved, holding it against your tree; attach it, file a lead, or record the link — always your call. Family Seats: on the Family plan, invite up to four family members to read the tree with you — each with their own account and place in the family, so Near Me, relationships and the paper answer from where they stand. Relatives by Kind: one generation at a time from anyone, couples together; relatives grouped by kind — cousins, in-laws, step-family — seen from anyone you choose. Near Me & the Map: who in your family has history within a mile of where you stand, and the whole world of your tree on a map, era by era. Tree Health: everything still open in one place — your margin corrections, the findings of The 24 Checks (twenty-four data-integrity checks over every person, family and date: impossible dates, a person recorded twice, a marriage to oneself) and orphan records — each with its road back to the source. Research Briefs: a structured brief for each brick wall, with sources and archives to try. 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. In the Record Books: the Acadian deportation rolls and the Union regiments of the Civil War, held the same way. Questions, never verdicts. 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. Two plans, each with a one-month free trial: $19.99 a year for one account, $29.99 a year for the Family plan with four seats. You built the tree. Now read it. Terms of Use: https://witnesslives.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://witnesslives.com/privacy