Technology for family history societies

Family History is more than just one or two large websites. It’s each of us working together to bring to light the information about our ancestors.

As a genealogy or historical society, what you have is important to genealogists everywhere. We want to help you get your information online and simplify your technical needs.

Wouldn't it be great if you could...

Have your volunteers make records and images searchable on your website without involving your already-stretched technical staff?

Give your users a world-class search experience like Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch?

Manage memberships and donations automatically online?

And wouldn’t it be even better if the software was free and hosting was affordable?

Need databases? No problem.

OurRoots started in Spring 2020 as a solution to the unique challenges family history societies face when trying to put their content online for members and/or the public. Our team got together to create a sleek, powerful content management system (CMS) specifically designed for genealogical records that knows how to handle dates, places, relationships, and odd spellings.

Make your site as easy to search as Ancestry.com

Our content management system makes it easy to create and manage databases on your website, automatically giving you a world-class search experience with soundex, wildcards, relatives, and event filters. Your search form (and search results!) will even work well on mobile devices.

Create categories & collections

Vital records, cemeteries, censuses, you name it…OurRoots was created by genealogists to meet the needs of family history societies.

Upload spreadsheets & assign search fields

Upload spreadsheets and images (if you want to include images), add them to a collection, and match up the search fields. It’s really easy.

Embed the search form on your site

OurRoots can be embedded in WordPress or any other site to give you a search form like Ancestry’s that will search your collections.

Need website hosting? No problem.

We’ve partnered with Kinsta to create a WordPress hosting solution for genealogy societies with premium WordPress plugins to help societies get high powered utilities for a low cost. When you host through OurRoots, your WordPress site will include these, and other, features:

  • the drag-and-drop Divi webpage editor
  • a membership management system
  • an event/calendar utility
  • a store for selling publications (optional)
  • the OurRoots content management system
  • search engine optimization (SEO) tools

Plans for societies

Whether you choose to host your site with OurRoots or elsewhere, the CMS is available to your society if your host allows you to create a plugin to install a JavaScript-based form on your site. Both plans include ticket-based support with additional support and/or design services for $20-$40/hour.

There are no annual commitments.

Hosted Website & CMS

We remove a lot of the complexity with setting up a WordPress site by curating and configuring the best plugins for societies. Hosting your site with OurRoots WordPress hosting gives you peace of mind knowing your site lives on a modern, powerful platform.
  • WordPress hosting with role-based access and custom menus for society leaders
  • Nightly backups
  • Premium membership plugin (Restrict Content Pro Ultimate)
  • Event/calendar plugin (Modern Events Calendar Free version — can be upgraded)
  • Event registration forms
  • Premium Divi drag & drop page editor
  • WP Fluent Forms Pro
  • E-commerce store
  • PayPal integration
  • Social media feed (Facebook & Twitter)
  • Other plugins for SEO, search, reporting, etc.
  • 2GB WordPress storage
  • 20GB CMS media storage
  • 500k CMS records
  • Additional WordPress storage $1/GB/month
  • Additional CMS media storage $0.10/GB/month
  • Additional CMS records $1/500k records/month
$30/month

Hosted CMS only

The world-class search form can be installed on any page which allows you to create and execute a JavaScript program that would call our CMS server in the background and deliver the search results. We’ve created a WordPress plugin to do this for WordPress sites. If you host elsewhere, please talk to your host and let us know if they would be interested in working with us to install a search plugin for your site.

  • 20GB media storage
  • 500k records
  • Additional media storage $0.10/GB/month
  • Additional records $1/500k records/month
$15/month

Note: OurRoots CMS is an open-source project. The software itself is free if you want to host it yourself! You are welcome to download (or fork) the project from GitHub and install it on your own AWS servers. If you are a developer, we would LOVE to have you join our GitHub project!

Want to see how it works?

Give us your email and we’ll send you more information.

30-day free trials start March 1st.

About the OurRoots Team

Together, we have over 100 years of technology and genealogy experience.

  • Jim Ancona, MS in Computer Science from WPI, former System Architect at Constant Contact, 35 years as a software developer.
  • Judy Chiang, BA in Political Science from UCLA, front-end Web Developer
  • Robert Gardner, PhD in Physics from Stanford, past Director of Engineer at Google, over 25 years as a software engineer.
  • Heather Henderson, product manager, designer, professional genealogist for over 20 years.
  • Dallan Quass, PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, past CTO at FamilySearch, and principal developer of WeRelate.org, GenGophers.com, RootsFinder.com, and co-founder of web search startups Junglee, FlipDog, and WhizBang Labs.
  • Solveig Quass, JD from BYU Law School, mother of five, avid family historian.