Family tree software without Ancestry: keeping the tree yourself

Keep the tree in a program on your own device, and use Ancestry and MyHeritage as places to search records and match DNA rather than as the place the tree lives. A GEDCOM file carries the people, facts, sources and notes out of either site; the pictures stay behind. Roots reads that file, keeps the tree in your browser’s private storage with no account, and writes GEDCOM again whenever you want to share it or put it back online. It is part of OBSCURA Pro.

Why keep the tree yourself

A family tree holds the names, birthdays and birthplaces of living people, their mothers’ maiden names, and often notes about illness that runs in the family. Those are the answers to security questions and the raw material of identity fraud. DNA and genealogy companies have had customer data stolen, and some of it was offered for sale. A tree in an account is kept on the company’s terms and is as safe as its servers.

A tree you keep yourself is a file. GEDCOM is the format every genealogy program reads, and a copy on your own disk does not need a subscription, or the company that made it, to open.

What the online sites have that a tree on your device does not

• The records. Census returns, parish registers and passenger lists at Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast and FamilySearch are on their servers, and searching them means going to them. Keeping the tree elsewhere does not change that: find a record there, and enter what it says in your own tree, citing the record.
• Hints. The sites suggest records and other people’s trees because they hold everyone’s data in one place. A tree on your device holds only yours.
• The DNA network. Your matches are the other people the company has tested, and they stay with the company. Roots reads the match lists that MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch let you download; it has no reader for AncestryDNA.
• A tree several relatives edit at once. A tree in Roots is on one device. A cousin is sent a copy or a branch as a GEDCOM file; two copies edited apart are not merged.

For many people that is reason enough to keep a subscription. The point here is narrower: the subscription can be for the records and the matches, while the tree itself is yours.

Getting the tree out

From each site’s own help pages, checked on 6 October 2026. Menus move, so if a name has changed, look for “export” in the tree’s settings.

Download the pictures you care about from the tree as well, and keep them with the file. Roots attaches pictures and documents to people and facts, and saves them with the tree.

A way of working with both

1. Export the GEDCOM from Ancestry or MyHeritage and open it in Roots. Tags of the sites’ own, such as how a child is related to each parent or a married surname, are read; any Roots does not show are kept on the record they came with and written back where they were. What was read, and anything that was not, is listed.
2. Do the searching on the record sites. Enter what you find in Roots, with a source for each fact and the quality of the evidence, and Roots keeps a list of the facts that still have none.
3. When you want the tree online again, or a cousin wants a copy, share it from Roots as GEDCOM with living people hidden or shown only as “Living”, or share one branch. On Ancestry, uploading a GEDCOM makes a new tree; it does not update the one you exported.
4. Save the whole project, pictures included, as an .oroots file now and then. Clearing this site’s data in the browser deletes the trees kept in it.

What Roots does with the tree

• Reads what the big programs write. GEDCOM 5.5.1 and 7.0, GEDZIP with its pictures, and Gramps XML; exports from Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker and Gramps; old files in ANSEL, Windows-1252 or UTF-16 in their own characters.
• Eight ways to look. Pedigree, descendants, hourglass, fan chart, family group sheet, the person’s page, a timeline, and the relationship between any two people.
• Finds the mistakes a merged-in tree brings. A child born after a parent died, a mother under 12 or over 60, a person who is their own ancestor; possible duplicates by name and sound, merged field by field with Undo.
• Prints. Charts as vector PDFs from A3 to A0 or a 36-inch roll, or tiled on A4 with trim marks, and a family history book in the Register or NGSQ numbering, as a PDF or a Word file.
• Shares safely. Living people hidden before anything leaves, with the list of who and why, as GEDCOM, as one branch, or as a website of plain pages that opens from a folder.

It has no street map, no search of online records and no hints, and it reads DNA match lists but not raw DNA files. Roots set against RootsMagic covers the desktop programs.

What it costs

Roots on its own is US$2 a month or US$19 a year; all of OBSCURA Pro is US$5 a month or US$48 a year. Each comes with 7 days free first. Pro also covers every OBSCURA application, Keep for the certificates and papers among them; /apps lists them. There is no free version of Roots with features held back.

See it before you pay. Roots’ page shows it at work on an invented family of 150 people, and lists what it cannot do.