Free software 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?
Who We Are
We are a small but growing number of volunteers (nerds 🙂 dedicated to providing free software for genealogy and historical societies. We have experience in product management, design, engineering, and genealogy. We love family history, and we love building software. What better way for us to give back than to build free turn-key family history software?
- Jim Ancona, MS in Computer Science from WPI, former System Architect at Constant Contact, 35 years as a software 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 and 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.
Our Business Model
Our software is open-source. That means anyone can use it, and anyone can help build it. Open-source software is one of the primary reasons technology has advanced so far so quickly. You’re likely already using open-source software. WordPress, Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice, and Linux are all open-source. We are creating open-source software for the genealogy community.
We plan to make money in two ways:
- Though you may run the software yourself, if you want us to run the software for you we will provide an excellent hosted solution (who can support it better than those who built it?) for a reasonable monthly fee. This is similar to the relationship between WordPress (free open-source software) and WordPress.com (paid hosting service).
- Our ultimate goal is to create a search engine, like Google, but specifically for genealogy content. We plan to make it easy for societies of all sizes to decide what content, if any, they want included in the search engine. In addition, we plan to create an open-source tree that will get hints from the search engine. We’ll then make revenue on the search engine and the tree.
Get Involved!
We are currently looking for a few societies to beta-test our software and tell us what is missing or needs improvement.
And if you’re a nerd like we are and love to design, build, or test software, please join us: Create awesome genealogy software and give it away!
If you are interested in getting involved with us, please contact dallan@ourroots.org.