Help:About WikiTree

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Mission

Our mission is to grow an accurate single family tree that connects us all and is freely available to us all.

Vision

WikiTree balances privacy and collaboration so that living people can connect on one world tree to common ancestors.

We privately collaborate with our close family members on modern family history. As we go back in time, the privacy controls open up. Collaboration on deep ancestors is between distant cousins who are serious about genealogical research, careful about sources, and willing to see their research validated or invalidated with DNA.

Because all the profiles are connected on the same system our collaboration is creating a single family tree that is connecting us all, preserving our history, and making our shared genealogy available for the world to access, for free, forever.

WikiTree team members Brian, Chris, Sarah, Jamie, Eowyn, and Ales at RootsTech 2020.

Community

WikiTree is a community.

Our shared tree is open to the world. Everyone is invited to enjoy the fruits of the tree. However, those who actively help to grow it must agree with our mission and our nine-point Honor Code.

Click here for some of the benefits of community membership. To emphasize: there are no "premium" memberships. Nobody is charged for access to anything on WikiTree. Ever.

Organization

WikiTree was founded by Chris Whitten and is hosted by Interesting.com, Inc.

The site first opened in 2008. It has been steadily growing and improving since then. The community improves the tree. Chris and the WikiTree team improve the technical infrastructure and tools. We do this by working with community members to discover what they need to further our shared mission — and to have fun doing it.

We have made a pledge to keep WikiTree free. This is possible because we are an ultra low-cost operation. Almost everything is done by volunteers. By keeping costs low we are able to cover expenses through modest ads on public pages.

Nothing lasts forever. Someday WikiTree.com will not exist, at least not in the form you see it now. But we are committed to preventing the information that we are growing together from being lost. See Protecting Our Shared Tree.