Your family's whole story. In five minutes.

Enter your surname and we trace its origin, its coat of arms and the ancestors who carried it. 2.1 billion records searched while you wait.

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ON ANCESTRY

Edmund Burke · Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

2.1BINDEXED RECORDS

480PARTNER ARCHIVES

92COUNTRIES

1560EARLIEST REGISTER

THE METHOD

How a surname becomes a documented lineage

Genealogy fails in two places. The name is searched in one spelling, and the match is accepted without a source. Our process is built to close both gaps.

Surname resolution

Your name is expanded into every historical form it has taken. Latinised parish spellings, phonetic clerk errors, port of entry transliterations and regional suffixes. One English surname routinely resolves to forty or more written variants before the first record is read.

Archive sweep

Those variants are queried across 480 partner collections. Parish registers, civil registration indexes, decennial census returns, conscription rolls, notarial deeds, probate calendars, passenger manifests and naturalisation petitions.

III

Handwriting recognition

Scanned pages are read by models trained on nineteenth century clerical scripts, then re read against the original image. Where the ink is faded, the entry goes to a human archivist rather than being guessed.

Record linkage

Candidate entries are matched into one person using date, place, parish, occupation and named relatives. Every link carries a confidence score. Anything below threshold is presented as a lead, never as a fact.

Documented lineage

The verified links become your tree. Each generation is cited to an archive, register, page and year, with the page image attached so you can read it yourself.

TECHNOLOGY

Machine reading, archivist standards

Script models

Handwriting recognition tuned per region and per century, because a Tuscan notary and a Prussian parish clerk do not form the same letters.

Variant engine

Phonetic, orthographic and translation rules generate the historical spellings of your name, including the ones a clerk invented at a border.

Confidence scoring

Each link is scored on date proximity, geographic plausibility and named relatives. Weak links are labelled, not hidden.

Image provenance

Every citation keeps the scan it came from, so any claim in your report can be checked against the original ink.

WHAT WE READ

The record classes behind your report

Parish registersFROM 1560Baptisms, marriages and burials

Civil registration92 COUNTRIESState birth, marriage and death indexes

Census returns310M ENTRIESHousehold, occupation and address

Emigration records1,400 SHIPSPassenger manifests, ports and arrivals

Land and probate48M DEEDSDeeds, wills, inventories and tenancies

Military rolls22M NAMESConscription lists, regiments and service papers

Heraldic rolls110K ARMSArmorial grants, blazons and visitations

New collections are digitised every month. Your lineage is re checked against them and you are told when something new appears.

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Your family history starts with a name

Five minutes to your first documented generation.