How to Claim Your Profile and Start Recording

Before you can see or record anything in MyBloodlines, you need to claim a profile. This single step is what ties your access to your actual place in your family’s bloodline — it’s not a formality to click past, it’s the thing that makes the whole record private, accurate, and genuinely yours.

Why claiming comes first

MyBloodlines doesn’t show you anything about a bloodline until you’ve claimed the profile that represents you within it. That’s deliberate: what you’re allowed to see and edit follows directly from where you actually sit in your family, and the system has no way to know that until you’ve claimed your own place in it. Until you do, you’ll only see two options — start fresh, or accept an invitation — and nothing else.

Sign in to MyBloodlines using your existing account. If this is your first time, your account is created automatically the moment you sign in.

Step 2: Choose how you’re joining

At this point you’ll see two paths, and which one applies to you depends on whether your family has already started recording in MyBloodlines:

If a relative has already started recording your family — they may have sent you an invitation to claim your own profile within it. Accept that invitation, and your account links to the profile they’ve already created for you, immediately giving you access to your place in the existing bloodline.

If nobody in your family has started yet — create a new profile for yourself. This becomes the very first person in a brand-new bloodline, and it’s automatically claimed as your own the moment you create it. From there, you can begin adding parents, children, and other relatives, and your family’s bloodline grows outward from that starting point.

Step 3: Understand what claiming actually unlocks

Once you’ve claimed a profile, MyBloodlines opens up access to your place in the bloodline: your own relatives, their stories, and their photos, based on how you’re actually connected to them. You’ll also be able to edit your own profile directly, since a claimed profile can only be edited by the person who claimed it — nobody else can rewrite your own biography out from under you.

If you’re joining with recording permissions (rather than view-only access), you’ll also be able to add new relatives, record stories, and attach photos. Either way, claiming is what defines the boundary of what you can see and do — and that boundary always follows your real place in the bloodline, not an arbitrary setting someone assigns you.

Step 4: Start recording

With your profile claimed, the natural next step is deciding what to record first. A few reasonable places to start:

Your immediate family. Add your parents and any siblings or children who aren’t already recorded, establishing the parent-child links that everything else in the bloodline builds on.
One story you already know well. Rather than trying to document everything at once, start with a single story — how your parents met, a memory from your own childhood, an event that shaped your family — and link it to everyone who was actually part of it. A full walkthrough of that process is in how to write a family story and link everyone in it.
A photo that needs context. If you have an old photograph nobody’s added yet, attach it to the people in it and the story it belongs to, so the context around it doesn’t disappear along with whoever currently remembers it.

A note on unclaiming

You can unclaim your profile later if you need to, but do so thoughtfully: doing so immediately removes your access to everything in the bloodline, and if your absence would leave part of the bloodline with no one able to access or maintain it, that part may eventually be scheduled for removal. This isn’t meant to alarm you — it’s simply why claiming is treated as a real commitment rather than a throwaway setting.

What comes next

Once you’ve claimed your profile and recorded a few basics, the rest of MyBloodlines opens up naturally: more relatives to connect, more stories to write, photos to attach, and eventually other bloodlines to connect with if you marry or a relative marries into a different family. For the fuller picture of why MyBloodlines is built around recording rather than research in the first place, start with what is MyBloodlines? Record your family history.

Start recording your bloodline Claim your profile and begin at MyBloodlines →