Frequently Asked Questions

You share what you know — names, rough dates, places. The team completes a free assessment of the available records, tells you what can realistically be traced, and you choose a package. We then research your lineage through public records — civil registers, censuses, church and synagogue books, immigration and land documents — and verify every fact against a primary source before it goes in your report.

It depends on where your family lived and what records survive. Silver reaches the early 1800s; Gold reaches colonial America in the 1600s; Platinum goes as far as the record reliably reaches — for some lines, back into medieval or even ancient times. We’ll tell you honestly during the free assessment what’s realistic for your family.

Typical turnarounds: Intro 2–5 days, Silver 7–10 days, Gold 15–20 days, Platinum about 30 days. Unusually deep or complex lines can take longer — if so, we’ll say so up front.

An interactive family history you open in any browser: a written narrative generation by generation, an interactive family tree, notable ancestors, mapping of your family’s origins (Gold and Platinum), your family photographs when provided, and a full appendix with the complete results of the research. The whole report also prints to a keepsake PDF.

Sapling.Family is a family-history research service. A lineage is assembled from surviving records, and connecting them across the generations involves judgment. Our findings rest on public records, established genealogical databases, and the analysis of a professional historian, and every conclusion in your report traces to a documented source — but no family history of this depth can be guaranteed complete or error-free. If something doesn’t look right to you, tell us: we’ll work with you to resolve it.

Yes. Where records allow, we can research your biological line — or the family that raised you. That choice is entirely yours, and we’ll talk it through with you before starting.

Yes — it’s one of our specialties. We work with censuses, Freedmen’s Bureau files, church and land records, and other sources shaped by enslavement and Reconstruction. Some eras are genuinely harder to document, and we’re honest about what the record shows and where it falls silent.

It’s used for your research and nothing else. Your family’s details are never shared or sold, and the finished report belongs to you.