myorigins.org

What It Is

myorigins.org is an online family tree creation service, positioned more for individuals and family collaboration than as a general-purpose enterprise SaaS. Users can create their own family tree, invite relatives to help add information, and share it with friends. The product emphasizes “social network-style” personal profiles for family members, making family history easier to read and explore.

Core Features and Collaboration

Its features cover the main use cases for family tree management: personal profiles, complex relationships such as adoption/step-relations/godchildren, alerts when conflicting information is entered, search by name/place/title, anniversary homepages and email reminders, plus indexes, calendars, timelines, maps, ancestor views, and descendant views. For collaboration, the system provides member, contributor, and admin accounts. Administrators can control who has access to the family tree and can also grant admin privileges to others. Visibility options include private, historical data public, or fully public, but the text indicates that historical data is public by default, so users should configure these settings carefully.

Pricing and Trial

Pricing is very low and based on a monthly subscription model. The 30-day free trial includes 30 profiles and 50MB of storage. Hobby costs £1/€1.25/$1.50 per month and supports 300 profiles; Advanced supports 1000 profiles; Professional supports 2000 profiles; Unlimited offers unlimited profiles and starts from 3000MB of storage. There is no minimum contract term and no advertising. Note that if a trial or subscription expires and is not renewed within two months, the family tree may be deleted.

Integrations, Security, and Limitations

Disclosed integrations include Wikipedia and Google Maps, while payment transactions are handled by PayPal. On privacy, the service states that it does not use personal data for marketing, does not hold financial information, and that employees generally do not view private family tree data. However, there is no visible information about encryption, backups, export, APIs, audit logs, or enterprise-grade compliance such as ISO/SOC, so it should not be evaluated as a mission-critical enterprise data system.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for genealogy enthusiasts, individuals, and small family groups that want to maintain family records at low cost. It is not suitable for organizations that need enterprise-grade permission auditing, API integrations, self-hosting, or local compliance deployment. Access from China is not addressed in the available text; meanwhile, dependencies such as Google Maps and PayPal may introduce network or payment uncertainty in mainland China. Alternatives to consider include Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, or building a simplified family tree using domestic knowledge base or spreadsheet tools.