Termsof use

The Family Lines is a private, invite-only archive for a family's photographs, documents, recordings and family tree, built and operated by SEMPITE in New York. By creating an account, signing in, or contributing material, you agree to the terms below. They are short on purpose.

Your account

Accounts are created by invitation from a family's curators and are personal to you — please don't share your password or let someone else use your sign-in. We may suspend an account that puts the archive or its members at risk.

What you contribute

• It stays yours. Uploading a photograph, document, recording or story doesn't transfer ownership to us.
• You give the archive permission to store it, back it up, and show it to the other members of your family's archive — including generating helpful aids such as written descriptions of photographs, which happens on our own private hardware.
• Only upload material you have the right to share, and be considerate about living relatives — if someone asks for something about them to come down, tell a curator and it will.

House rules

No unlawful, hateful or abusive content; no attempts to access another family's archive or another member's account; no scraping or republishing archive material outside the family without the contributor's permission.

Curation

Changes to the family tree are proposals until a curator approves them. Curators may decline, edit or remove material to keep the archive accurate and kind.

The service itself

The archive is provided as-is. We back everything up nightly and keep prior versions of files, but no online service is a substitute for keeping your original photographs and papers safe. Features may change as the product grows.

Waitlist

Joining the waitlist is an expression of interest, not a contract — we open spots a few families at a time.

Changes and law

We may update these terms; the date above always tells you when. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York.

Questions

Reply to any email the archive has sent you, or use the form on the home page.