You might know that your grandmother was born in 1938, married in 1959, and lived most of her life in Ohio. But do you know what songs she played while cleaning the house? What recipe everyone asked her to bring? What story she told so often that the whole family could recite it?
The driving idea behind genealogy is tracing your blood ancestors. Traditional genealogy systems focus just on tracing that blood line.
Family history, on the other hand, is capturing and telling the stories behind those people. Interviews, videos, and photos.
Genealogy - finding those records, documenting the details, and getting the facts down - helps you figure out the basics. But without the stories, the feelings, and the memories, your family tree can end up as just names on a page. We think the two are better together, despite some flaws.
Serious genealogy applications don’t consider videos or music to be genealogy data. But the video of that family gathering from 1992, or the music that your grandparents loved, those things help us connect to our ancestors and get a little closer to them. So FamYarn lets you link a video or a spotify playlist to each person. We think our users are okay with adding non-genealogy data to their family trees.
FamYarn is for people who want more than a chart, but still care about getting the chart right. It’s a place to build the tree, but it’s also a place to preserve the family story.