Our Story

Building the perfect family tree platform


The Surname Tree

The Surname Tree was proposed in 2015 by its founder and CEO, Tim Richardson, because we all need something better than Ancestry.com
Over the years family tree apps have come to be dominated by ancestry.com, which takes advantage of its virtual monopoly to charge much more than it should. The result is that serious researchers get value for money but your own relatives wanting to know a bit about your family will not spend five minutes on the web before they hit a pay wall, and it is usually ancestry.com.

The Surname Tree is designed around a simple premise, that family heritage should belong to the family and not to ancestry.com. In every family there are individuals, or documents, of interest to the family, and as family you should have the right to access it without going through some third party who has laid claim to charge you for your own history.

All your relatives have something, or know something, that is of interest to the rest of the family, so the idea here is that everyone contributes their own photos / recollections / documents and together build a collection that benefits the whole family.

Get started on your own Surname Tree today, get other relatives involved as curators to share the effort, and build up a Collection of knowledge and documents that your descendants will appreciate.

Get started on your own Surname tree

Build the family Collection - together