Reads
Your branch, six generations up
Each household with its dates and places. Every source attached to a person. The census pages, read as the households they describe. Record hints. The coordinates FamilySearch holds for each place.
Witness Witness For FamilySearch Family Tree
Family Tree was written by millions of hands, and your branch of it holds more than anyone has read. Witness reads the branch where it lives, nothing exported, nothing moved, and turns it into a daily edition: one of your people each morning, the place they stood, the household around them, and the record that says so.
Family Tree itself is never changed.
One month free, then $19.99 a year. In your browser today. The iPhone and iPad app follows with its next update.
Listed in the FamilySearch Solutions Gallery as a Compatible Solution, and independent of FamilySearch. The map above and the figures on this page come from one real branch of Family Tree, read on 21 October 2026: 937 people, 1,104 places on the map, 411 record hints to check.
Inside Witness
A front page each morning: one of your people, the year, the place, the household around them.
Every town, parish and county on record, placed from the coordinates FamilySearch holds. Move through it by century.
Questions answered from your own branch. Who crossed an ocean. Who lived longest. Who was alive in 1776.
Twenty-four checks for what cannot be true, each linked to the person on FamilySearch.org so you can correct it there.
Family Tree stays yours
You sign in on FamilySearch.org, in your own browser. Witness never sees your password, and the sign-in lasts only for that session.
Reads
Each household with its dates and places. Every source attached to a person. The census pages, read as the households they describe. Record hints. The coordinates FamilySearch holds for each place.
Writes
A headstone photograph, read at the graveside with the iPhone app or added from your library, attached to that person's Memories where cousins on the same line will find it.
Nothing else. No person, relationship or fact is ever added or changed.
Never
What Witness reads from Family Tree is never sold, leased or sublicensed, and is removed when you delete the tree. No fact from Family Tree is ever put in front of an AI model: every page for a branch is built from the record alone.
On every person's page
Each hint shows the collection and the confidence FamilySearch gave it, with a link to examine it on FamilySearch.org. Where a fact looks wrong, the page links to the person in Family Tree, so the correction is made where the record lives.
Hearth · early access
Choose a household the census found at home and step inside on that day: the hour, the weather, the fire, the furniture of that place and period. The room is drawn from a catalogue of the time; the people are stand-in figures, not portraits.
Pricing
Witness
$19.99 a year · one account
Cancel during the month and you are not charged.
The reading starts from you, so your FamilySearch account needs to be connected to your own person in Family Tree.