Your family name,
on the record.

Give us one surname.
We follow it through the public archives and hand back what is there, with the source for every claim.

Where the facts come from

Every name leaves a paper trail.

A real page, held in a public archive, found by searching for the name. This is the kind of thing that comes back.

Clark

A merchant house takes out the whole front of page twelve

Evening Star · Washington, D.C. · June 3, 1909
Library of Congress.

What comes back

The record under a name is bigger than one report. We build from it — chapters to read, pages to print, pieces to keep — and we keep adding as the archives do.

Learn more

148,257 surnames
on the census

Clark

The name, and what it meant Wikidata
How common it is, and where U.S. Census Bureau
Pages it appears on Library of Congress
People documented under it Wikidata
The crossing it likely made Passenger lists

How it works, start to finish.

Only the first step is yours. The rest is us reading, and you reading what we found.

Type the family name

The one thing everybody already knows by heart. Nothing else is asked of you, and nothing is stored until you decide it should be.
We read the archives

Newspaper pages, census surname files, passenger manifests and authority records get searched for that name, and what comes back is what you get.
The first chapters open

You read them straight away, on the page, with the citation printed beside each claim so you can go and check it yourself.
Keep what you open

Yours from then on, on screen or on paper. One payment, and no clock running on it.

1740 → 1902

You never do the searching.

From a 1740 indenture to a 1902 telegram, the paper is already there and already public. The hard part is finding one name inside a century and a half of it — and that part is ours.

Try your family name

Where this goes

A family is not one name.

You carry your father’s name, but your mother’s line has its own record, and so does every branch that married in. The archives keep growing under all of them.

99,284,421 people counted under a surname U.S. Census Bureau
19,729 newspaper pages held Library of Congress
1752 the earliest year on file Chronicling America

The part you can hold.

Everything above lives on a screen. These don’t. Each one is made to order from the same record you just read — nothing here sits in a warehouse waiting for a name.