Your story didn't start with you.
A modern desktop app for understanding your family history — patterns, places, longevity, migrations — across the lives that made yours possible.
90-day free trial·One-time license·Your data stays on your machine
Most genealogy software is a filing cabinet with a search box. FamilyLoupe is built around a different question: now that you've gathered the records, what do they actually tell you about the people you came from — and about yourself?
No subscription. No platform lock-in. Your GEDCOM, photos, and edits live in folders you own. If we ever disappear, your tree doesn't. Sync to Dropbox, back up to a thumb drive, hand it to your grandchildren in 40 years — it's a folder.
Life expectancy by line, by sex, by century. Economic mobility across every documented generation. Migration journeys on a year-slider map. Most-distant ancestor on each branch. An endogamy detector. A "what's missing" research priority list. Charts that surprise you.
The tree is rooted on you. Every page answers "what does this mean for me?" — your branches, your inherited haplogroups, your ancestors' wealth trajectory, the relationship calculator that names exactly how your second cousin is your second cousin.
FamilyLoupe is one self-contained desktop app. No accounts, no cloud, no monthly bill. Here's what's inside.
Pan, zoom, click any card to refocus. Expand-up arrows on outer ancestors. The tree is the home page.
Names, dates, places, occupations, addresses, facts, signatures, custom life events — and inline pencils to edit any of it.
Watch your ancestors arrive, settle, scatter. Press play and centuries of migration unfold on one map.
Life expectancy by branch, by sex, by century. Causes of death by category. The longevity story of your family.
Eight great-grandparent lines, color-coded. Wealth and class trajectories as deep as your tree goes.
Today in history. Generation coverage. Most distant ancestor per line. Common given names. Endogamy. Research priorities.
Y-DNA and mtDNA inheritance spines. Add your test, see which ancestors share each haplogroup.
Oral history from living relatives, kept distinct from book-sourced family histories. With sources, photos, and people-tags.
Every personal photo across the tree, in one scroll. Click any face to jump to the profile.
Type any two people. FamilyLoupe finds the common ancestor and tells you exactly how they're related.
Keep your tree and your spouse's separately, or research a friend's family. One license covers all of them.
Every fact can carry a source. Census images, wills, ship manifests, civil registries — transcribe inline, never lose the trail.
Some families wouldn't be themselves without the dog who slept on every couch, the cat who outlasted four jobs, the parrot who learned grandma's whistle. FamilyLoupe has first-class records for them, with the depth they deserve.
The big sites are research databases — billions of records, hint engines, DNA matching with millions of testers. Use them to find your ancestors. Then use FamilyLoupe to own what you found, and to actually understand the picture.
| The big sites | FamilyLoupe | |
|---|---|---|
| Records database | World-class — billions of indexed records | None. Use Ancestry / FamilySearch for research, then bring your GEDCOM here. |
| Where your data lives | On their servers, behind a subscription | In a folder on your computer |
| If you stop paying | Tree becomes view-only or inaccessible | Nothing changes — it's your file |
| Pricing | $30+/month, forever | $29.99 one-time ($19.99 launch) |
| Works offline | No | Yes, fully — no internet needed |
| Patterns & analysis | Basic charts, mostly hidden | Health, economic mobility, migrations, branches, endogamy, generation coverage |
| Modern UI | Improving slowly under decades of legacy | Built for it from day one |
| Privacy | Cloud-stored under their privacy policy; subject to research-partner sharing and government requests | Local app — no data leaves your computer, no telemetry |
We use Ancestry too. The two tools complement each other.
If you already have a GEDCOM export from Ancestry, MyHeritage, or any other genealogy tool, you're four steps away.
Download the Windows installer. About 70 MB. No accounts, no setup wizard hell.
Import a GEDCOM, or start from scratch, or try the bundled sample family.
Choose your home person (and optionally your spouse). The tree centers on you.
Insights light up immediately. Edit, add stories, attach photos, watch the picture sharpen.
Genealogy software shouldn't cost more than the records you find with it. No subscriptions, no tiers, no upsells. Try the full app free for 90 days. If you keep using it, the license costs less than a single month of Ancestry.com — and you only pay once.
Less than RootsMagic ($34.95). About a quarter of Family Tree Maker ($80). Cheaper than a single month of Ancestry.com.
Your data is yours. It lives in standard formats — your GEDCOM is GEDCOM, your photos are JPGs, your edits are a human-readable JSON file — in a folder on your computer. If we vanish tomorrow, you can open every file with software that already exists, and your existing install keeps running.
This is the opposite of how most genealogy companies work. It's a deliberate design choice.
Yes, fully — the core app never needs the internet. The only baseline network call is one-time geocoding of place names to map coordinates (cached after first run). Two opt-in features, off by default, can talk to the internet if you turn them on: the AI chatbot when set to a cloud backend like OpenAI or Groq (set it to Ollama instead and it stays fully local), and the MCP integration when you connect Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code to your tree. Both are clearly disclosed in Settings before you enable them.
Yes. FamilyLoupe reads standard GEDCOM 5.5.1 files, including the extended tags Ancestry, MyHeritage, Family Tree Maker, and RootsMagic produce. We also read the newer GEDCOM 7 format and GEDZip (.gdz) archives — both are auto-detected, so you don't need to know which version your file is. Re-import anytime your research GEDCOM updates — your local edits, photos, and stories are preserved.
Most of them, immediately. The tree, profiles, map, photos wall, branches, relationship calculator, life-expectancy snapshot, "today in history," common-names analysis, generation coverage, and most of the insights cards all work the moment you import a standard GEDCOM.
A few of the deeper features depend on data that GEDCOM files rarely carry — cause-of-death analysis needs you to add causes of death, the economic-mobility view needs occupations and a few facts like home ownership and acreage, and the DNA inheritance spines need you to record your test results. None of this requires research from scratch — FamilyLoupe has inline editors for every field, and you only need to fill in the ancestors you actually want to study. The features fade in as you add data.
You don't need to. It's already exported — the GEDCOM and your overrides file are sitting in the install folder right now. You can also export a refreshed GEDCOM at any time that includes everything you've added in FamilyLoupe, ready to import back into another tool. Export defaults to GEDCOM 5.5.1 (the format almost every genealogy service still uses today); GEDCOM 7 is available as an alternative in Tree settings if you specifically need it.
FamilyLoupe is Windows only at launch. Mac is a likely follow-up. The engine is Python, so a Mac build is a packaging job, not a rewrite — but we want to nail the Windows experience first. Linux users with Python installed can run from source today, though it's not officially supported.
Those are mature record-keeping tools — strong on data entry, with decades of polish on capturing every detail of a research session. FamilyLoupe overlaps with that work, but the heart of it is the analysis layer that surfaces patterns the others don't try to show you.
Specifically: life expectancy by branch, sex, and century. Economic mobility tracked as far back as your records go. A year-slider map that animates centuries of migration. Branch coverage so you can see what's missing. An endogamy detector. Rooted-on-you views — your branches, your inherited haplogroups, your ancestors' wealth trajectory across time. Multi-tree from a single license. And a fast, modern UI built for it from day one rather than retrofitted onto two decades of legacy.
Many users will keep their existing tool for data entry and use FamilyLoupe to actually see the shape of their family. They complement each other — and FamilyLoupe comes in below all of them on price ($29.99 vs. RootsMagic's $34.95, Legacy's $35, FTM's $80).
FamilyLoupe ships two optional AI features. Both are off by default and both are bring-your-own-key — we don’t bundle an AI subscription into the price, so you choose the provider, you pay them directly, and you control the privacy posture.
1. In-app chatbot. A chat button on every page that knows your tree. Useful for things like “who in my tree died young?” or “find everyone with a Boston connection.” Two ways to power it:
2. MCP integration. An optional sidecar that exposes your tree to any AI desktop app that speaks the Model Context Protocol. Currently supported: Claude Desktop (current build with MCPB extensions), Cursor, VS Code (via GitHub Copilot Chat 1.99+), and Claude Desktop legacy config. Once connected via the one-click flow in Admin → AI integrations, you can ask your tree questions from inside the AI app you already use. Uses your existing AI subscription — no separate cost to FamilyLoupe.
Both features only send data when you ask the AI a question that requires it, and only the records relevant to that question — never your full tree. Each provider has its own retention policy; we surface it in Settings before you opt in.
No telemetry, no analytics, no “anonymous usage stats.” FamilyLoupe does not phone home. The only baseline network call is geocoding (place names → coordinates, via OpenStreetMap’s free Nominatim service — calendar dates only, never your tree).
Two optional AI features can send data over the internet if you opt in: the in-app chatbot when configured with a cloud backend (Groq, OpenAI / ChatGPT — uses your own API key), and the MCP integration when you connect Claude Desktop or another external AI client to your tree. In both cases, your question and a small set of records the AI specifically asked for are sent to whichever provider you chose — never your full tree, never proactively, never without you asking the question. Each provider has its own data-retention policy; pick the one whose terms you trust. The source is not obfuscated — you can verify all of this.
The app drops into read-only mode: you can still browse your tree, look at photos, run insights, use the map — but the edit buttons are hidden. Buy a license at any time and editing turns back on. Your data is never deleted, locked, or held hostage.
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