What Is MyBloodlines? Record Your Family History

Most family history software starts from the same assumption: somewhere out there, in a scanned census record or a DNA match, is a fact about your family that you don’t yet know. Find it, and your tree grows.

MyBloodlines starts from a different assumption entirely: you already know most of what matters. You know your grandmother’s maiden name, the year your family moved cities, the story behind the scar on your father’s hand, which cousin actually raised which children when a parent couldn’t. That knowledge lives in your head, in a few photo albums, in things older relatives have told you over the years — and it is disappearing, one conversation and one person at a time.

MyBloodlines exists to catch it before it’s gone. It is a place to record family history, not research it.

Recording, not researching

The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A research tool’s job is discovery: it holds a vast collection of historical records and DNA data, and its whole design is built around helping you find people you don’t already know about. That is a genuinely hard, valuable problem, and tools built for it are good at it.

MyBloodlines doesn’t try to do that job. It has no record archive to search, no DNA testing, and no algorithm guessing at who might be related to you. Instead, it gives you a structured, permanent place to put down what you already know — a person’s name and birth details, the story of how they met their spouse, the photograph from the migration that changed everything for your family. If a fact isn’t already in your head, in a relative’s memory, or in a box of photographs somewhere, MyBloodlines won’t surface it for you. That’s not a missing feature. It’s the whole point. For a closer look at how these two jobs differ, see recording vs. researching your family history, and for the broader case for treating them as genuinely different categories of software, see research vs. recording: two kinds of family history software.

Memory and knowledge as the raw material

Because MyBloodlines is a recording tool, the input is you — or more precisely, your family’s collective memory. A parent profile gets filled in with what a person actually remembers about that parent: where they were born, what they did for a living, the traits people still talk about at gatherings. A story gets written the way you’d tell it out loud, then preserved exactly that way, permanently, instead of drifting a little further from the truth every time it’s retold secondhand.

This is deliberately low-tech in spirit. There’s no import tool that pulls in a record set for you, no automated hint that tells you a document might belong to your family. What goes into MyBloodlines is what a person sits down and writes, because they were there, or because someone who was there told them. That’s a slower process than running a search, but it produces something a record search never can: your family’s own account of itself, in your family’s own words.

Built to last, not to impress

The tone of MyBloodlines follows from that purpose. This isn’t a feed you scroll, and it isn’t a place designed to be checked daily. It’s closer to an archive — calm, considered, meant to still make sense in twenty years, in fifty. Every person, story, and photo you add is meant to sit there permanently, available to whoever in the family needs it next, whenever that turns out to be.

That permanence is only possible because of how the underlying structure works. Rather than each relative keeping their own private, incomplete copy of “the family tree,” MyBloodlines holds one shared, canonical record — a single graph of people where every person exists exactly once. There’s no central owner deciding what counts as correct and no risk of five cousins maintaining five conflicting versions of the same grandmother’s biography. One person, one record, contributed to by whoever in the family has something to add. The mechanics of how that collaboration works — and why it doesn’t need a single archivist in charge — are covered in one shared family history: how relatives record together.

A quick tour: person, story, photo

The clearest way to understand MyBloodlines is to follow a single click-through path, because this is really how the whole archive is meant to be used.

Open a person’s profile and you’ll see their core details — name, birth information, the roles and traits people associate with them — alongside a single profile photo and a list of every story they’re connected to. Click into one of those stories and you get the full narrative: not a caption, but the actual account of an event, a migration, a life chapter, written by whoever recorded it. That story page also lists everyone else who was part of it, each of them linking straight to their own profile. Click through to a photo attached to the story, and you’ll see who’s in it and which other stories reference it.

Nothing here dead-ends. A person leads to their stories, a story leads to its people and photos, and every one of those leads back out again. Over time, that interlinking is what turns a pile of separate memories into something that reads like a coherent family record rather than a scattered collection of anecdotes. The full mechanics of that interlinking — and why stories and photos are treated as first-class entries in their own right rather than notes buried inside a person’s page — are covered in people, stories, photos: one interlinked archive.

When you don’t want to navigate at all, global search takes you straight there: type a name or a few words from a story, and MyBloodlines returns any person or story that matches within the part of the graph you’re allowed to see. That’s the point of recording in the first place — so the history is there to look back on. Years later, a grandchild can start at the graph, open a profile, follow it to a story, then to a photo from that story, then to someone tagged in the photo, and keep going — or jump directly to whatever they’re looking for.

Who this is for

If you’re hoping to discover unknown ancestors, find long-lost relatives, or confirm a family legend using DNA evidence, MyBloodlines isn’t the tool for that job — a research platform is, and a good one will serve you well. But if you already have the knowledge — the stories your parents told you, the names on the back of old photographs, the details that only exist because someone in your family still remembers them — and you want a permanent, private, collaborative place to put that knowledge down before it’s lost, that’s exactly what MyBloodlines was built for. For a wider look at how research platforms, DNA tools, and recording apps compare, see the best family history & genealogy apps compared. And for the broader, step-by-step overview of preserving a family’s history that MyBloodlines is built to serve, see how to preserve your family history: a complete guide.

Claiming a profile is the first step, and it’s a deliberate one: it’s what ties your access to your actual place in the bloodline, and what keeps the whole record private and accurate. There’s more on how that works, and what to do once you’ve claimed your profile, in how to claim your profile and start recording.

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