Terms of Service

Last updated: August 24, 2026

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1. Who you are contracting with

This website, myheritagestories.com, is operated by FamilyCrests Studio LLC, a limited liability company formed in the State of Wyoming, USA (File Number 2026-001951698), trading as FamilyCrests™.

In these terms, "we," "us," and "our" mean FamilyCrests Studio LLC. "You" and "your" mean the person using the site or placing an order.

Our only contact channel is customer@myheritagestories.com. We do not operate a telephone line or a live chat. That inbox is read by a person, and we answer within 48 hours. If you need to reach us about anything in this document, that address is the place. Our postal details are on the Contact page.

2. Agreeing to these terms

By using this site, by requesting a free report, or by placing an order, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site or buy from us.

You must be at least 18 years old to order from us or to request a free report. By ordering, you confirm that you are.

All prices are shown and charged in US dollars.

3. What you are actually buying

This is the most important section in this document, so we have written it plainly.

3.0 Free reports

Some reports on this site cost nothing. Our Coat of Arms and Origins pages ask you for a surname and an email address and produce a report for you at no charge.

Everything in this section 3 applies to those reports exactly as it applies to a paid one. Same system, same determinism, same limits, same disclosures. A free report is not a sample of some better, human-researched version — there is no such version.

Three things specific to free reports:

• There is nothing to refund, because nothing was paid. If you later buy a paid volume, section 10 applies to that purchase.
• We can change or withdraw a free report at any time, and we do not promise to keep producing one for any particular surname.
• Giving us your email address there also adds you to our marketing emails. Every one of them carries an unsubscribe link, one click is enough, and you can also just write to customer@myheritagestories.com. The Privacy Policy explains what we do with that address.

3.1 The digital volume

The Heritage Volume is a report about a surname, sold in three one-time-purchase packs:

We also publish The Crossing, a report on migration routes. It is a separate purchase from the Heritage Volume, and its price is shown on its own page.

Each volume is delivered as a web page plus a PDF by email, within minutes of payment. A volume is a one-time purchase: no subscription, no renewal fee, and nothing further to pay for it, ever. The Family Register, in section 3.5, is a separate and entirely optional plan — buying a volume never puts you on it.

Two consequences of the way this works, worth saying before you pay:

• If you buy the same surname twice, you receive the same volume twice. The system does not produce a second, different report for the same name.
• You buy the volume as it exists on the day you buy it. If we improve the system later, we are not obliged to reissue your volume — though we often will if you ask.

3.2 How the volume is produced — read this before you buy

Your volume is built by our own system from public reference material — the U.S. Census Bureau surname file, digitised newspaper pages held by the Library of Congress, and open structured records — and the rest of it, including the coat of arms, is generated by that same system from the surname itself. The chapter prose is written by a language model working from that material, and the heraldic artwork is generated by artificial intelligence. The same surname always produces the same volume: no one researches your family, and naming an archive is not a claim that we searched it on your behalf. Where a surname is not in a public source, our system completes that section rather than leaving it blank, so your volume arrives whole and part of it is reconstruction rather than record.

How to tell one from the other. Where the volume shows a source and a link, you can open it and check for yourself. Where it does not, treat it as our system's reconstruction. We do not promise that every reconstructed passage carries a label saying so, and a reconstructed figure can sit in the same place, and in the same style, as one that was read off a record. If you want to know where a particular figure, date or paragraph in your volume came from, write to customer@myheritagestories.com and ask about that specific item. We will tell you straight.

Our page How Your Report Is Made forms part of this agreement. It is the full account of the method — which parts are sourced, which parts the system builds, and what the volume does not claim. If anything in this section 3 and that page differ, that page governs on the subject of method (see section 16).

What you are buying, then, is a finished volume built by our system — not a commissioned investigation, not billable research hours, and not a report about your particular ancestors.

3.3 What the volume is not

To leave no room for doubt:

• It is not a genealogical investigation of your family and not proof of descent.
• It does not establish a connection between you and any person named in it.
• The coat of arms is an artistic interpretation associated with a surname. It is not a grant of arms, confers no heraldic right, and is not recognized by any heraldic authority, in any country.
• There is no DNA testing involved. We never collect, sequence, or analyze genetic material. Any genetic content is population-level and must not be used for any medical decision.
• It is not legal, medical, or financial advice, and it has no evidentiary value before a court, a registry, a consulate or a bank.

3.4 The physical products

We also sell physical products — for example the signet ring, the framed crest and the family pack. They are made to order by outside manufacturers and are a separate purchase from any digital report, bought through the shopping cart rather than through the report checkout.

The artwork on a physical product carries exactly the same status described in section 3.3: it is artwork associated with a surname, not a grant of arms.

Production time, transit time, what a delivery costs, and what happens when one order arrives in more than one package are all set out on the Shipping & Delivery page. Cancelling, returning or replacing a physical item is set out on the Refunds & Cancellations page. Both of those pages govern their own subjects.

3.5 The Family Register — a recurring plan

The Family Register is a subscription. It is separate from buying a volume, and entirely optional. Buying a volume never puts you on a plan, and nothing in section 3.1 changes because this exists.

The plans, the prices and what each one opens are set out on the Pricing page and on each plan's own page. Here is what matters legally, in plain terms.

• It renews by itself until you stop it. The Name and The Family are charged every month. The House is charged once a year. On the day it renews we charge the card you used, automatically, at the price shown when you subscribed, and we keep doing that until you cancel. You are agreeing to that when you subscribe, and we say so again on the checkout page and in the email that confirms it.
• What one period gives you. One volume per month on The Name and The Family; on The House, one of each title per month. It does not carry over. If a month goes by and you do not open your volume, that month's volume is gone when the next one opens — it does not accumulate and it is not refunded. We say this on the plan page, on this page, and inside your account, because it is the term most likely to surprise you.
• You cancel yourself, in two clicks. It is in your account, under Your plan. No email, no phone call, no reason required, and no one is going to try to talk you out of it. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for: you keep the plan, and that period's volume, until that day. Nothing further is charged after it.
• Everything you opened stays yours. This is the part that does not change. Every volume you opened while on a plan keeps working, keeps its link, and keeps growing as new public sources are digitised — for good, at no further cost, whether or not you are still a member. Cancelling never closes a volume. Your license under section 4 covers those volumes exactly as if you had bought them one by one.
• If a payment fails. We try the card again over the following days. While it is failing, the plan pauses: no new volume opens for that period. Everything you already opened stays open the whole time. If it never clears, the plan ends and you are not charged again.
• If we change the price. We will email you at the address on your account at least 30 days before a renewal at a new price, so that you can cancel first if you would rather. A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.
• Refunds on a plan. A subscription payment is refundable within 30 days of that charge, the same as a volume, and one email to customer@myheritagestories.com is the whole process. If you already opened that period's volume, we refund the payment and the volume still stays yours; we are not going to take back something we already gave you. The Refunds & Cancellations page governs this subject and has the detail.

If a plan page and this section ever disagree about what a plan includes, section 16 tells you which one wins — and the short answer is: whichever gives you more.

4. Your license to use the volume

When you buy a volume, you get a permanent, worldwide, personal license to use it, granted in return for the price you paid. Plainly, and this is deliberate:

You may:

• Read it, as often as you like, for as long as you like.
• Print it — once, or a hundred times — at home or at a print shop.
• Save it, back it up, and move it between your own devices.
• Share it with your family — email it to your children, print copies for a reunion, read it aloud at a gathering, or leave it to your heirs.
• Frame a page and hang it on your wall.
• Quote from it in a family history you write, a school project, or a personal blog post, with credit to FamilyCrests™.

The file is yours to keep, and we are not going to police what you do with it inside your own family. What stays with us is ownership of the underlying work — see section 8.

You may not:

• Resell it, or sell copies, extracts, or adaptations of it.
• Redistribute it commercially — publish it on a paid site, bundle it into a product, or use it as part of a service you charge for.
• Post the full volume publicly in a way that makes it a free substitute for buying it — for example, uploading the complete PDF to a public file-sharing site or document library.
• Strip out our name and present the work as your own.
• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the site; run automated queries against the surname system to harvest volumes; reverse-engineer the system; or resell access to it.
• Use the material to train a machine-learning model or to build a competing product.

If you would like to use a volume commercially — in a published book, a business, or a broadcast — write to customer@myheritagestories.com and ask. We are usually happy to say yes; we just want to be asked.

This license does not expire, and it survives even if we later stop selling the report. One exception, and it is the fair one: if the order is refunded or charged back, the license ends with it, and we close the hosted access described in section 7. We will not ask you to delete a file you already downloaded, and we will not chase you for it — but from that point you no longer have permission to share it, print it for other people, or redistribute it.

5. Prices, taxes, and payment

Prices are in US dollars and are shown on the product page. The price that applies is the price displayed at the moment you complete your purchase. We may change prices at any time, but a change never affects an order you have already placed. If you have a promotion code, there is a field for it at checkout.

Two checkouts, one company. Digital reports are paid through a secure payment page hosted by Stripe. Physical products are paid through the shopping cart on this site. Both are ours, and both are covered by these terms.

Payment methods. We accept cards — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, JCB and UnionPay — and the digital wallets your device offers at checkout, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link. We do not accept PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, bank transfers, or buy-now-pay-later services such as Klarna or Afterpay. Card payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number; your card details go to Stripe, not to us.

Tax. The amount shown at checkout before you pay is the amount we charge you. We do not add sales tax on top afterwards. If we ever become required to collect sales tax, GST or HST where you live, it will appear at checkout before you pay, not later.

Import charges on physical goods. The price of a physical product includes shipping and delivery to your door, and there should be nothing to pay when it arrives. Customs authorities are not ours to control, so we will not claim they can never ask for anything — but if a carrier ever asks you for an import charge on an order from us, email us and we cover it. The Shipping & Delivery page governs this subject.

You do not need to create an account to buy. Checkout is as a guest.

If a payment is declined, reversed, or charged back, we may suspend access to the volume associated with that order until the matter is settled.

Orders we cannot fulfill. Very occasionally we may have to cancel an order — a pricing error on the page, an item a manufacturer can no longer make, an address we cannot ship to, or an order we reasonably believe to be fraudulent. If that happens we cancel the order and refund you in full. That is the whole of it: we do not charge you and keep you waiting.

6. Delivery

Digital reports are delivered within minutes of a successful payment: a link to the web version, and the PDF by email.

If it does not arrive, check your spam folder first, then write to customer@myheritagestories.com and we will send it again at no charge. Two things commonly go wrong and both are fixable: a typo in the email address, and an over-eager spam filter.

Physical products are made to order and shipped by our manufacturing partners. To make and send your order, we give the manufacturer your name, your shipping address and the phone number the carrier needs, and the item you ordered. Timings, costs, tracking, split shipments and what happens if a piece is going to be late are all on the Shipping & Delivery page.

7. Permanent access, and what that means

Your volume lives at a private link secured by a token, and that link is meant to keep working. The /my-reports/ portal can also be opened with Google Sign-In. Customers who bought with a promise of lifetime access to that portal keep that access.

Being straight with you about what "permanent" can and cannot mean:

• We intend to keep your volume reachable at its link for as long as we operate the site, at no further charge. There is no renewal fee and no subscription attached to it.
• We may change the address, the design, or the technology behind the portal. If a link has to change, we will email you the new one at the address on your order.
• If you ask us to delete your personal information, we do it — and hosted access goes with it, because the link is tied to your order record. Download your PDF before you send that request. The Privacy Policy explains how to make one.
• If an order is refunded or charged back, we close the hosted access that came with it, as section 4 says.
• No website is guaranteed to exist forever, and we will not pretend otherwise. The PDF is yours outright — that is the copy that does not depend on us. If your volume matters to you, download the PDF and keep your own backup. That single step makes your access genuinely permanent regardless of what happens to this business.

If this business is sold, or if it closes. Lifetime access is the longest promise we have made to anyone, so here is what it is worth:

• If we sell or transfer the business, your volume, your license under section 4 and your portal access go with it. We will make honoring them a condition of the sale, and we will tell you by email at the address on your order that someone else is now running the site.
• If we ever wind down instead, we will give you reasonable notice by email before the portal closes, so that you can download everything you paid for first. We would rather send that email early than quietly let a link go dark.
• Neither of those events cancels your license. The file you downloaded stays yours, and nobody has to keep our servers running for that to be true. It is the reason we keep telling you to download the PDF.

Keep your access link private. Anyone who has it can view your volume.

8. Intellectual property

What is ours. The site, its design and text, the software that builds the volumes, the specific artwork we generate, and the FamilyCrests™ name and branding belong to us or to our licensors. Buying a volume gives you the license in section 4 — it does not transfer ownership of any of that.

What is not ours, and we will not pretend it is. Traditional heraldry is centuries old and largely in the public domain. The old symbols, colors, patterns and written descriptions of arms, and the customary designs associated with surnames, are part of a shared inheritance. We claim no ownership over traditional heraldic designs, over any surname, or over the history of any family. What we own is our particular rendering, our text, and our software — nothing wider than that.

Public-domain source material. Newspaper facsimiles, census figures, and open reference records reproduced in a volume are public-domain or openly licensed material. Our rights extend to how we present and arrange them, not to the underlying sources — those remain free for anyone to consult, and we link to them for exactly that reason.

FamilyCrests™ is an unregistered trademark used in commerce.

If you believe something on this site infringes your copyright, write to customer@myheritagestories.com with enough detail to identify the work and where it appears, and we will look into it and take it down if you are right.

9. If something in your volume is wrong

Given how the volume is produced, this deserves a straight answer rather than a disclaimer buried in the fine print.

We do not warrant that the content of a volume is accurate, complete, or applicable to your family. We cannot, and any seller who tells you otherwise is overselling. The sourced material is reproduced as we found it in the public record, which itself contains errors, transcription mistakes, and gaps. The generated material — including the sections our system reconstructs when a surname is absent from a source, as described in section 3.2 — is produced by our system and is not a record of anything.

So:

• You should not rely on a volume as evidence of ancestry, as the basis of a legal or financial claim, or as the foundation of a medical decision.
• Never treat the genetic content as a health input. It is population-level material and cannot tell you anything about your body. Talk to a doctor.
• If you are doing serious genealogy, treat a volume as background reading about a name, and verify anything that matters against primary records.

What we will do about it — this is the one paragraph on the subject, and the other pages point here. Write to customer@myheritagestories.com and:

• If your report did not arrive, or arrived at the wrong address because of a typo, we send it again. No second purchase.
• If you entered the wrong surname on a digital report, we send you the correct volume. No second purchase.
• If you find a factual error in the sourced part of your volume — a misattributed newspaper page, a wrong census figure, a link that goes somewhere else — we look at it, correct it where we can, and reissue your volume at no charge. We would genuinely rather know.

A physical item that was already made with a name on it is a different situation, because the metal or the print cannot be un-engraved. The Refunds & Cancellations page covers that case, including the difference between our mistake and a name that was typed into the order.

And if the volume simply is not what you hoped for, section 10 applies.

10. Refunds and cancellations

The full policy, with the exact steps, is on the Refunds & Cancellations page, and that page governs this subject. Here is the binding short version.

Digital reports: 30 days, no questions asked. Write to customer@myheritagestories.com within 30 days of purchase and ask. You do not need a reason, and it does not matter that you already read the report or downloaded the PDF. The money goes back to the card or wallet you paid with; how long it takes to show up depends on your bank, and it usually appears on the following statement. When we refund, we also close the hosted access that came with the order, as section 4 explains.

If a page you bought from promises you more, that page wins. Some pages on this site display a 90-day satisfaction guarantee. Where that badge appeared on the page you bought from, the 90-day window is what you get for that order. These terms set a floor, not a ceiling — see rule 2 in section 16.

A duplicate charge is not a change of mind. If you were billed twice for the same thing, write to us even if it is past 30 days. We refund duplicates whenever you find them.

Abuse is the one case where we say no. We may decline a refund where there is clear evidence of it — for example, repeat purchase-and-refund cycles of the same surname, or redistribution of a volume in breach of section 4. That is the only exception, and it is not a test we apply to ordinary customers.

Physical products are made to order, which limits what can be undone once production starts. You can cancel a physical order within 12 hours of purchase. After that it is being made for you, and a change of mind is not by itself grounds for a return. If a piece arrives damaged, defective, or not what you ordered, tell us and send a photo: we replace it or refund it, whichever you prefer, and you do not have to ship the piece back to us. The Refunds & Cancellations page has the detail.

11. Acceptable use of the site

Use the site normally and this section will never concern you. Specifically, please do not:

• Scrape, crawl, spider, or bulk-download the site or its output.
• Run automated or scripted queries against the surname system.
• Attempt to breach, probe, or interfere with the site's security, or access another customer's volume or order.
• Overload the site with traffic, or interfere with anyone else's use of it.
• Use the site for anything unlawful, or to harass anyone.

We may suspend or block access where we reasonably believe this section is being broken.

12. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including liability for fraud or intentional misconduct.

Subject to that:

• The site and the reports are provided "as is." We do not promise the site will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we do not warrant the accuracy of the content, for the reasons set out in section 9.
• We are not liable for indirect or knock-on losses — lost profits, lost opportunities, or losses arising from decisions you make in reliance on a volume.
• Our total liability to you for any claim connected with an order is limited to the amount you actually paid us for that order.

That cap is deliberate and it is the trade we are offering: a modest price for a report whose method we describe honestly and whose limits we spell out, rather than an expensive product sold on promises we cannot keep.

13. Third parties we work with

Running the site involves other companies — payment processing, email, hosting, analytics, advertising measurement, order tracking, the artificial-intelligence services that generate part of the volume, and manufacturing for physical products. Which company receives what is set out in our Privacy Policy.

We are responsible to you for your order. We are not responsible for the content of any third-party website we link to, including the public archives whose records we cite and link.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms, and any dispute arising from them or from an order, are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. This is the page that decides that question; where another page on this site mentions it, it is only pointing back here.

Before anything formal, write to us. Most problems turn out to be a delivery that did not arrive, a misunderstanding about what the volume is, or a refund that should simply have been issued. Email customer@myheritagestories.com with your order number and what went wrong, and give us a fair chance to fix it. Most things are resolved the same way they started — by email.

There is no arbitration clause here, and no class-action waiver. We have not asked you to give up the right to take a complaint to court, or to join with other people in doing it, and nothing in these terms should be read that way.

Subject to the above, the courts of the State of Wyoming, USA, have jurisdiction over any dispute. This does not take away any right you have under the consumer-protection law of the state or province where you live, where that law says it cannot be signed away.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms — for instance, when we add a product, change a shipping option, or change how something works.

• The "Last updated" date at the top of this page always shows the current version.
• Changes are not retroactive. The terms that apply to your order are the ones in force on the day you bought.
• If we make a change that materially affects customers who have already bought — for example, to access under section 7 — we will email you at the address on your order rather than quietly editing the page.

Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms for future orders.

16. Which document applies if two of them disagree

These documents, together, are the agreement between you and us: these Terms of Service; *How Your Report Is Made* (our method and disclaimer page); the Refunds & Cancellations page; the Shipping & Delivery page; the Privacy Policy; and the Cookie Policy. Each carries its own "Last updated" date. No other page on this site forms part of the agreement, and no advertisement, social post, or marketing email changes these terms — except as rule 2 below allows.

We have written these documents to say the same thing. If two of them ever disagree, here is the order, and we will apply it in your favor where it is close:

1. The specialist page wins on its own subject. How a report is produced, and what it does and does not claim → How Your Report Is Made. Refunds and cancellations → Refunds & Cancellations. Delivery, shipping, tracking and customs → Shipping & Delivery. Personal information → the Privacy Policy. Cookies, pixels and advertising opt-outs → the Cookie Policy. Anything else, and anything that is not clearly one of those subjects, → these Terms.
2. A promise that gives you more still stands. If a product page, a checkout page, or an email we sent you promised you something better than these documents give you — a longer refund window, a lower price, an extra copy, faster delivery — you get the better promise for that order, provided it was shown or sent to you before you paid. Tell us and we will honor it. These documents set a floor, not a ceiling.
3. A promise that gives you less does not stand. Nothing elsewhere on this site cuts down a right these documents give you, and nothing here cuts down a right the consumer-protection law of your state or province says cannot be signed away.
4. Plain-language summaries never override the detail. Every one of these pages opens with a short summary. It is there so you can read it; it is not the term itself. Where a summary and the numbered section below it differ, the numbered section governs — unless rule 2 applies.
5. Silence is not a denial. If one page says nothing about a subject, that silence does not override what the page that owns that subject (rule 1) says about it.
6. The version that applies is the one in force on the day you ordered. Later changes are not retroactive. If you need to know what one of these pages said on the day you bought, write to customer@myheritagestories.com and we will tell you.
7. If you spot a conflict, tell us. A contradiction between our own documents is our mistake, not yours, and we will read it the way that favors you while we fix it.

17. The rest

• If a clause fails, the rest of these terms stay in force. A court may strike or narrow an unenforceable clause without unraveling the agreement.
• Not enforcing something once does not mean we have given it up.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms to someone else, except that the license in section 4 passes to your family and heirs as described there. We may transfer our rights if the business is sold, on the conditions set out in section 7.
• Headings are for convenience and do not affect meaning.

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Contact

Questions about these terms, or about anything else, go to one address:

customer@myheritagestories.com — we answer within 48 hours.

Related pages: How Your Report Is Made · Refunds & Cancellations · Shipping & Delivery · Privacy Policy · Cookie Policy · Accessibility · Contact

FamilyCrests Studio LLC, based in Wyoming, USA — FamilyCrests™

Last updated: August 24, 2026