What happens to your family history when you’re gone?
It’s an uncomfortable question, but it’s the one that matters most. You’ve spent years building a family tree and gathering photos — but if it all lives in a subscription account, what happens to it when the card on file expires, or when you’re no longer here to pay and log in?
The quiet risk of “the account”
Most people’s family history sits behind a login they alone control. When a subscription lapses, access is often reduced or locked. When the account holder passes away, families regularly find they can’t get in at all — terms of service, privacy rules, and a forgotten password combine to lock the door on decades of work. The data still exists; the family just can’t reach it.
Ask the “could my family get this?” test
For anything you’d hate to lose, ask:
- If I stopped paying tomorrow, what would my family still have?
- If something happened to me, could someone else actually open and use it — without my password?
- Can the whole thing be exported as plain files that work on their own?
If the honest answer is “no,” your family history is borrowed, not owned.
How to make it outlive you
- Own the data, not just access to it — keep your archive as files you (and your heirs) hold, not only inside one company’s app.
- Give more than one person the keys — make sure a trusted family member can log in and run it too.
- Keep real backups in more than one place (how to back up).
- Write down where everything is — the server, the domain, the logins — with your important documents.
Built to be inherited
Private Family Archive is designed to outlast any subscription — and its owner. It runs on a server your family owns, the whole archive is a portable file you can hand down, you can give multiple family members their own admin access, and it keeps working with no ongoing dependency on us. Pay once; it’s yours, and theirs.