Yore: the past is closer than you think
Yore researches where a family comes from and tells it back as a narrated film on a map through time, with the source behind every sentence.
Give Yore one name, a birth year and a place. Its researcher (an AI that reads published records and histories) follows the family back a generation at a time: census and church entries, obituaries, county histories, compiled genealogies. The first answers arrive in about a minute and the search keeps going from there.
What it finds is told as a documentary: a narrator, a map that moves through the years, paintings of the places, real photographs from the time where they exist, and a theme composed for the film. A family can be followed whole, or one surname at a time, or as the film of a single life.
Every sentence that states a fact can be opened to the record it rests on. Yore says how sure it is: what a record proves, what is only reported, what is a reasonable inference, and what nobody knows. Paintings and music are new, and are labelled as imagined wherever they appear.
What is Yore?
Yore is a family history service at yorehistory.com. It researches a family's ancestry from one name, and tells what it finds as a narrated documentary film on a map through time, with every statement tied to its source. It also keeps a public almanac of places in their time: what a town was like in a given decade, from cited sources.
How does Yore research a family?
An AI researcher reads published sources (record indexes, newspapers, county histories, compiled genealogies and community trees) and follows the family back generation by generation. Each parent-and-child link is marked as documented by a record, reported without proof, speculative, or disputed. If it takes a wrong turn you can tell it, and it searches again.
How accurate is it?
Yore labels every statement by how it is known: documented (a specific record says so), remembered (family testimony), historical context (reliable scholarship about the time and place), reasonable inference, imagined (an illustration), or unknown. It does not present a guess as a fact, and it shows the source so that you can check it. Like any genealogy, links that are only reported should be verified before being relied on.
How is Yore different from Ancestry or FamilySearch?
Those services hold the records and the trees. Yore does not replace them: it reads what is published, tells you what it found as a story you can watch and share, and says how sure it is of each part. A tree you have already built elsewhere can be brought in as a GEDCOM file, with its photographs, and becomes a family you can watch as a film.
What does Yore do about living people?
Yore researches the dead. Living people are not looked up in people-search directories, and nothing that is shared publicly (a film, a card, a line) names a living person: they are counted, or shown as a generation without a name.
The interactive app (maps, films, your own family) needs JavaScript.