For genealogists
The engine, on the record.
This page is written like documentation because that's what it is: how Passage actually handles your file, your evidence, and your living relatives. If a claim here ever stops being true, it comes off the page.
Import & round-trip fidelity
- GEDCOM import
- Bring exports from Reunion, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Ancestry, MyHeritage, or any GEDCOM-producing tool. The import preview shows what came through, person by person, before anything is saved.
- Nothing silently dropped
- Tags and subtrees Passage doesn't model yet are preserved verbatim alongside the record and travel back out on export. A round trip through Passage does not quietly lose what your file carried.
- Cross-reference IDs
- GEDCOM xrefs are preserved, and re-imports deduplicate against them rather than minting duplicates.
- Dates
- Stored as GEDCOM date strings — "1 JAN 1900", "ABT 1850", "BET 1800 AND 1810" — never coerced to timestamps. Partial and approximate dates round-trip losslessly.
- Places
- Free-text places are the entry path, with optional normalization and geocoding layered on top — your source's own words are never overwritten by a gazetteer.
Evidence & citations
- The evidence layer
- Sources, repositories, and citations are first-class records, not note fields. Facts link to the citations that support them.
- QUAY surety grades
- Citations carry GEDCOM QUAY 0–3 quality ratings, verbatim quotations from the source, and supports/contradicts weighting — the raw material of a Genealogical Proof Standard argument.
- Research workflow
- Research projects hold tasks and findings, so an open question and the evidence that eventually answers it live in the same place.
Living-people privacy
- Default-private living people
- A person with no death date is treated as living, and living people are private by default. Unknown never means public.
- Per-person control
- Visibility can be tuned person by person and member by member. A deny outranks every other grant — including the family account's own admins.
- Children
- Living minors get a stricter plane on top: stories that name a living minor are refused outright, and their photos are blocked from leaving the family's private space.
Collaboration & review
- Propose → review → apply
- Contributions from relatives, guests, and connected AI assistants land as proposals in one review queue. Nothing overwrites the record silently.
- Direct edits, honestly
- Proposals by default. A tree admin can enable direct edits for trusted editors — irreversible actions and free-text-risk fields stay review-only regardless.
- Guest research projects
- An outside collaborator — a hired professional, a distant cousin, a one-name-study contact — is scoped into a research project and sees exactly the people it covers, nothing else.
Archivist workspaces
- Client engagements
- The primary model keeps ownership with the family: the client family has its own account, and you join as a guest researcher on your own seat. You file proposals; they apply them; their data never leaves their hands.
- Pro-drafted trees
- For work that starts before the family is aboard, draft in your own workspace — unlimited workspace trees — and transfer the finished tree at handoff, consented on both sides.
- Practice tooling
- A cross-family dashboard over your engagements, 100 GB of media storage, and three practice seats for you and your assistants.
Export & portability
- Formats
- Full GEDCOM export, and GEDZIP when you want the media to travel with the file.
- Every state, free forever
- Export works on the trial, on every paid plan, and in the lapsed archive state after a subscription ends. Paywalling your own data would contradict the point of the product.
The trial is the full toolkit for 30 days — long enough to run your own file through a real round trip and check our work.
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