Free family tree: what you actually get

“Free family tree” is one of the most searched phrases in genealogy, and for a good reason: almost everyone who starts one runs into a paywall sooner or later, usually after they have already put in the work.

It is worth understanding where those paywalls sit before you choose where to build.

Why genealogy services charge

Most large genealogy platforms are not really in the family tree business. They are in the records business. Their cost is digitising and indexing archives — census returns, parish registers, immigration and military records — and that is what a subscription buys.

The tree itself is cheap for them to host. It is the hook: you build it for free, and the moment the service finds a possible record match, seeing it requires a plan.

That model is honest enough, but it means two things for you:

1. Building and keeping a tree should not, by itself, cost anything.
2. Before investing years of work, check what happens to your data if you stop paying.

What should be free

A family tree tool that charges for any of the following is charging for the basics:

• Adding people and relationships. The core function.
• Photographs. A tree without faces is a diagram. Photos are the point.
• Notes and stories. The details that make an ancestor a person.
• Dates and places. Birth, death, where someone lived.
• Keeping your own data. Being able to see and take out what you put in.

Where paying can be reasonable

There are things genuinely worth money, because they cost real money to produce:

• Access to indexed historical records. Someone had to photograph and transcribe them.
• Professional research when a search hits archives in another country.
• Printed products — a bound book, a large printed chart.

The distinction is simple: paying for access to records is fair; paying for permission to write down your own family is not.

What to check before you start

A few questions that save regret later:

• Can relatives see the tree? A family history that lives in one person’s account dies with that account.
• Are living relatives handled properly? Living people’s details should not be exposed publicly by default.
• Does it work on a phone? Most family history is gathered in a kitchen, at a funeral, at a birthday — not at a desk.
• What happens to photos? Original resolution or compressed into uselessness.

Start with what you already know

The most valuable part of a family tree costs nothing and cannot be bought: what your oldest relatives remember. Names, maiden names, where the family came from, who moved where and why.

That source disappears. Archives will still be there in ten years; the ninety-year-old who remembers her grandmother’s name will not. Whatever tool you choose, start with the conversation.

A tree that stays free

In iRitual the family tree is free: add relatives, upload photos, record dates and stories, and the generations lay themselves out as you go. Living and departed relatives appear in the same tree, marked differently, so the family stays whole.

For those who have passed you can also save the GPS coordinates of the burial place — so that the people who come after you can find their way.

Free, on iOS and Android.