Your ancestors witnessed history.
Witness lets you witness them.
You have thousands of ancestors. You can't answer the simplest questions about them.
A serious genealogist can spend years building a tree of five thousand people — and still have no way to ask it who was alive during a war, who lived in the town they're visiting, or which life among all those names was the most extraordinary.
Ancestry and FamilySearch are excellent at what they were built for: research and construction. But discovery, analysis, and meaning-making are afterthoughts. The tree grows, and the questions that would make it matter go unanswered.
Witness is the intelligence layer built for exactly that gap — the questions a family tree should be able to answer, and finally can.
What Witness can tell you.
Three moments where the tree comes alive.
You ask one question and the answer reorders how you see your family — a thousand people who lived through a moment you only knew from a history book, each with a name, an age, a place.
You are standing in a cemetery you drove past a hundred times. Your phone confirms what you never suspected: a fourth great-grandmother is buried thirty-eight meters from where you stand.
A name in a database becomes a life. A warm, readable biography — where she was born, what she believed, what it cost her — and suddenly an ancestor is a person you feel you have met.
Witness deepens over time. It doesn't exhaust itself.
Branch Focus
Designate a heritage — Acadian, Colonial New England, French Canadian — and the whole product reorients around it. The lens you see your family through becomes the one that matters to you.
Research Brief Generator
Every brick wall becomes a structured research document — named archives, record types, and prioritized questions. It is a place to begin, written by something that has read the whole tree.
Annual Family Wrapped
Each December, a personal summary of your family's year in history — the discoveries made, the ancestor of the year. A ritual that returns, and a reason to come back for it.
The Inheritance Transfer
The archive is built to be handed on. The tree, the biographies, the discoveries, and a letter in your own words — passed to the next generation with ceremony, as a gift rather than a login.
Walk among them.
Every genealogy tool ever built asks you to look at your family tree from the outside. Witness inverts that entirely. Family Street View puts you inside the tree — walking from house to house through the generations, your ancestors present in the rooms around you, the time slider aging them in real time as you move through their world.
Each family unit is a candlelit house interior, period-accurate to the era. Ancestors stand as figures sized to their age — children small, elders stooped, the hearth burning.
Drag it forward and children grow, parents age, figures fade at the year of their death. Drag it back and a young couple appears before their children are born. Time becomes felt, not calculated.
Leaving through the back door brings you to two houses side by side — the families of origin of each parent. Every threshold you cross takes you one generation deeper into the past.
I'm Rufus Howe. I've spent years building a family tree of over 5,000 people — and kept running into the same frustration: the tools are excellent for building, and poor for discovering.
Witness is my attempt to fix that. It's built on my own family's GEDCOM file, validated against real data, and designed for people who take their family history seriously.
I'd value your perspective.
Twenty minutes
Honest feedback on whether this solves problems you actually encounter.
Early access
A seat in the beta, in exchange for your thoughts as it takes shape.
Introductions
To others in the genealogy community who might want to know about this.
This preview is shared by invitation. Thank you for taking the time.