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.
How it works
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.
How sure it is
Everything Yore says about the past carries one of six labels, and can be opened to see why.
- Documented
- A specific record says so.
- Remembered
- What someone in the family remembers or was told. Testimony, not a record.
- Historical context
- Reliable scholarship about the time and place — not about this person.
- Reasonable inference
- A conclusion drawn from documents and context. Could be wrong.
- Imagined
- An illustrative reconstruction to help you picture it. Not evidence.
- Unknown
- An honest gap in what can be known.
Questions
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.
What are the places in their time?
Each is a study of one place in one decade (for example a Pennsylvania coal town in the 1880s): its work, faith, law, money, dangers and news, year by year, written from cited sources. They are about the place, never about a person, so each is researched once and is free for everyone to read at yorehistory.com/places.
Is Yore free?
Reading is free: the places in their time, released films, and any family already in Yore's archive. A search for someone new uses AI that costs money to run, so it takes a stamp. For now Yore is open by introduction: someone who is already in writes you one (everyone who is in has a few to give), passes a family on to you, or sends you stamps; anyone else can ask to be introduced from the search form. Whoever is let in is given 10 stamps, which is enough for a first family several generations back, and more for the first line they follow; a stamp comes in the post each week to anyone who is short; and more come when someone begins their own family from something you sent them. After that stamps are $1 a stamp, or less by the sheet or the roll, and they do not run out. Someone who wants Yore to go on working for their family can be its keeper, by the month or the year: stamps every month and a new film made from their tree every month, and nothing is taken away if they stop. What a stamp finds goes into the shared archive, so nobody pays for it twice.
Can I share what Yore finds?
Yes. A film of one life can be released at its own address for anyone to watch without an account. A surname's line can be put on a card. A family can be counted up into a short set of cards (My story), and a film's trailer can be made as a video to post.
Can an AI assistant use Yore?
Yes. Every place page is also available as plain Markdown, the site is described at yorehistory.com/llms.txt, and there is a read-only connector (Model Context Protocol) at yorehistory.com/mcp through which an assistant can search the places Yore has researched and read any of them with its sources. Setup is described at yorehistory.com/connect.