About
Our goal is to connect all people on Earth into one coherent graph. Human Lineage is one global, public genealogy graph of humanity — not another app with private per-user trees.
A graph, not a tree
Classic genealogy sites make you start a separate tree for every account. We maintain one shared pool of people and relationships, gathering data from archives and genealogy databases worldwide.
Missing links between families today create many disconnected subgraphs — islands. Over time, as new relationships are discovered, islands merge together.
Scale
The database grows with every import and community edit.
Data sources & licenses
We import historical data from open databases — always respecting the source license, with an identifier linking the profile back to the original record.
- Original sources — data imported directly from available archives and vital records
- Wikidata — main source of historical people — public-domain data
- WikiTree — verified community genealogy trees
- VIAF — authoritative person identifiers (national libraries)
Full license terms for each source are described in the Terms.
The GEDCOM-X standard
We store data according to GEDCOM-X — FamilySearch's open standard for exchanging genealogical data as JSON. People, facts (birth, death, marriage…) and relationships (couple, parent-child) have standardized URI types, which makes import, export and integration with other services easier.
Contact
Questions, data error reports or collaboration proposals: [email protected]