ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I met Simon Davies earlier this year at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City, he was doing what’s quickly becoming a time-honored tradition of “making the rounds” in the Salt Palace expo hall to spread the word about a new product or service ready to hit the market in the genealogical community.

Now let me first say that in the almost quarter of a century that I’ve been a part of expo halls at genealogy events, it’s fair to say “I’ve seen ‘em, and I’ve seen ‘em go.”

Frankly put, (and apologies for a horrible mixed foods metaphor) there are many, many “greatest things since sliced bread” that have turned out to be far “more sizzle than steak.”

Davies was in from London, England, and was pitching the website for his product “We Are” (WeAre.xyz) with a URL extension I’d never seen before. His sincerity and passion for his product showed through but it took a while before we caught up with each other for him to more completely demonstrate his product.

Simply put, We Are is a family archive builder. It’s a place, first of all, to put the individuals from your family tree, connecting them to the others, and store the facts about them.

That’s basic and achievable on loads of genealogy websites, of course, but it’s where We Are takes you from there that is more interesting.

Through features on the website, you can add documents, photos, artifacts, and other types of media; blog about them; and write full biographies about the individuals in your tree.

Davies’s passion revolves around wanting to all these items to survive from this generation to the next, which often fails to happen. “The idea of We Are is to keep family history research in plain sight,” he said.

Especially when it comes to artifacts that are one of a kind—think of a piece of clothing or even a baptismal certificate—Davies notes that “only one person in the family can own that item, but through We Are it can be digitally shared with the entire family.”

And unlike the very large family trees on some websites, the users of We Are maintain control over their content (I guess I’d call this “no risk sharing!”). There are also appropriate privacy controls dealing with living people in the We Are trees.

So is We Are sizzle or steak? Even with that quarter of a century under my belt, I can’t give any guarantees (though I’m reminded of when I met Legacy Tree Genealogists owner Jessica Dalley Taylor some years ago … becoming her employee for a time just a few years later and remaining an affiliate of LTG).

Pricing plans for We Are start at only $4.99 a month and all levels come with a 30-day free trial of the We Are Family Archive.

All the details are at the website URL, https://weare.xyz/