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 let you record or see anything until you’ve claimed the profile that represents you. 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

Claiming opens up your place in the bloodline — the relatives you’re actually connected to, along with their stories and photos. What you can see and edit isn’t decided by who claimed what; it’s decided by your permission boundary, which follows your real position in the graph rather than a setting someone assigns you. See permission boundaries in MyBloodlines for exactly who that covers.

Step 4: Start recording

Claimed and ready? Pick one small thing rather than trying to document everything at once:

Add the people closest to you. Grow the graph outward with your parents, your children, your parents’ other children (siblings), and the other parent of your children (spouse). It’s an odd way to phrase it, but recording only parent–child ties is exactly what keeps the archive structurally consistent over generations — the reasoning is in why MyBloodlines only records parent-child ties.
Write down one story you already know by heart. How your parents met, a childhood memory, an event that changed the shape of your family. Write that one, and link every person who was actually part of it. How to write a family story and link everyone in it walks through it.
Rescue a photo from losing its context. Upload one that matters to your family, give it a name and description, and attach it to the people in it and the stories it belongs to — so what it means doesn’t disappear with the people who remember it.

Step 5: Invite your relatives for collaboration

A bloodline is worth far more when the people in it are recording alongside you. On the bloodline graph, click the options button on a profile and choose Invite User to Claim, then enter that person’s email address. An invitation email goes out to them, and once they sign in, the invite is waiting in their dashboard home to accept — which claims that profile as theirs.

Worth understanding: unlike other family tree apps, MyBloodlines has no center. There’s no group, no owner, and no single person controlling who gets access or what permissions they hold. Everyone you invite stands in the graph on their own footing, with their own boundary determined by their own place in the family. That design is explained in why MyBloodlines has no groups, only people.

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 →