Frequently asked questions
If you cannot find an answer here, feel free to reach out.
MyBloodlines is a collaborative family history app built on a relationship graph. Every relative is a person profile, and stories and photos are linked to the people they involve. It's for recording the family you know, together with your relatives — not for researching strangers.
Sign in with Google or Apple, then claim a profile. If your family is already recording, a relative invites you to claim your existing profile; if not, you create a fresh profile for yourself and become the first person recorded on your side. Until you claim a profile, you can't see any content.
Claiming links your user account to a specific person in the graph — it tells MyBloodlines who you are inside the family. All of your access is calculated from that position.
No. Each profile can only be claimed by one person at a time. If you want to claim a profile that is already claimed, you must wait for the current claimant to release it or initiate a claim dispute.
You can unclaim a profile from the Access & Requests page. You will see a clear warning about the consequences — including potential data loss — before the action is confirmed.
Only people whose permission boundary reaches your relatives. There is no public search, no directory, and no way for a stranger to look your family up. Nothing in MyBloodlines is public.
Yes. You can only access data within your permission boundary. No data outside your boundary is ever returned by the server — it is enforced at the API level, not just in the UI.
Your permission boundary is the set of people you can view and contribute to, calculated from your position in the graph. It covers your ancestors, everyone who shares a common ancestor with you, and the spouses of all those people. It's recomputed automatically whenever the graph changes.
You share no common ancestor with your in-laws, so they fall outside your boundary. Your spouse can see them, because they're on that side. To see them yourself, ask your spouse to grant you read-only view access to their boundary.
You don't — your spouse does. Your in-laws sit inside your spouse's boundary, so your spouse claims a profile and records that side of the family. This is the same rule that stops anyone else from reaching into your side.
Three steps: add your child from your own profile; when asked for the other parent, choose "Connect to an External Person" and enter your spouse's profile ID; then someone on your spouse's side accepts the request. That's the join — your child becomes the new generation where the two bloodlines meet.
No. There are no groupings in MyBloodlines — only individuals and the relationships between them — so there's no "inside" or "outside" for the child to be added to. Whichever parent starts, the result is identical.
A profile ID is a unique identifier for a person profile, shown on the profile itself. You share it directly with someone outside your bloodline the way you'd share a phone number. It's how you point at a person you can't already see, so you can connect to them.
If both people you want to link are already within your own permission boundary, you just select them and the relationship is recorded immediately. A request is only needed when one of them is outside what you can see — even if other people can see both of them, and even if the two are already connected through relatives further along.
Because a connection between two families should reflect a relationship two real people confirmed. Reaching someone you can't already see requires holding their profile ID and getting their side to accept. That's what keeps strangers out of your family's record.
Parent-child is the only relationship that's unambiguous and permanent. Siblings, grandparents, cousins, and spouses are all derived from it automatically, so there's nothing to record twice and nothing to keep in sync as the graph grows.
No. Person profiles are permanent once created. If someone was added by mistake, the way to remove them from the active graph is to delete the relationship that connects them.
Yes, but only relationships in your own direct line of ancestors or descendants — not among cousins or other relatives. MyBloodlines warns you first, because deleting a link can cut off access to everything on the other side of it.
If no user at all can reach a set of people, they're considered abandoned and scheduled for deletion after a grace period. That's why unclaiming a profile or deleting a relationship shows an explicit warning before you confirm.
Stories and photos are independent entities linked to one or more people, not buried inside a single profile. One event can be attached to everyone who was part of it, and each person's profile lists every story they appear in. There's one canonical copy — no duplicates, no conflicting versions.
Viewers can browse everything in their permission boundary, edit their own claimed profile, and share view access. Contributors can additionally add and edit people, create and delete relationships, write stories and photos, invite users, and handle cross-graph connection requests.
Explorer is free and viewer-only. Archivist is a single contributor seat. Historians (5 seats) and Bloodliners (10 seats) are contributor plans where the spare seats can be assigned to relatives — so one person can pay and the whole family can contribute.
Yes. If a relative on Historians or Bloodliners assigns you a spare seat, your effective license becomes contributor even if your own plan is the free Explorer. Only the subscription owner can revoke an assigned seat.
Nothing needs to be handed over. Access follows the graph, so the next generation simply claims their own profiles and inherits access to their part of the family automatically. No single person owns the graph or holds the keys to it.