Terms of Use

Probably Cousins Terms of Use

Last updated: 2 November 2026. Effective: 2 November 2026.

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

Probably Cousins is a family-history service operated by Probably Cousins LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“we,” “us”). These terms govern your use of probablycousins.com, each family's own site at <family>.probablycousins.com, and anything we provide through them (together, the “Service”). By ticking the box or clicking the button clearly identified as accepting these Terms, you agree to these Terms. Additionally, our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information. You must accept these Terms before creating an account, requesting a starter tree, accessing a family site as a guest or through a personal link, or making a purchase. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Our address is 250 Indian Road, Palm Beach, FL 33480. You can reach us at hello@probablycousins.com.

2. Where we offer the Service

The Service is offered to people in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the “Service countries”). We do not yet offer it to, and do not knowingly serve, residents of the United Kingdom, the European Union or any other country. If you live outside the Service countries, do not create an account or upload a family tree. A relative who lives elsewhere may appear in a family's tree as a subject of that tree. If we learn that you reside outside the Service countries, we may suspend access while we confirm your eligibility. If confirmed, we will close your account, refund unused purchased credit, and delete personal information you provided, except records we are legally required to retain.

Prices are in U.S. dollars. Our payment partner, Link, acts as the seller of record and adds any sales tax, GST or VAT that applies where you live; your bank may also charge a currency conversion fee. Nothing in these Terms limits a consumer guarantee or right that the law of your country gives you and that cannot be excluded, including under the Australian Consumer Law and the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act.

3. What the Service is, and what it is not

We help families keep a shared tree, and we estimate how likely it is that two people are related. We state probabilities, not facts. Each connection we show carries a confidence word and the evidence behind it. “No connection found” means no one has yet found the paper trail; it does not mean you are not related. Labels such as “Confirmed”, “Proven” and “Probably” describe our assessment of the available evidence; they do not certify a relationship or establish a legal fact. Unless expressly stated and explained, our confidence labels are not statistically validated probabilities.

We are not a genealogist, a lawyer, a court of record, or a DNA service. Nothing on the Service is legal, financial or medical advice. Nothing on it establishes identity, citizenship, inheritance, membership of any lineage society, or any legal relationship. Do not rely on the Service for any of those purposes without independent professional verification.

4. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service, including as a member, guest or gift recipient. By accepting these Terms, you confirm that you meet this requirement. An adult may include a child as a subject of a family tree, subject to these Terms and our Privacy Policy.

Family trees often contain living children. A child named in a tree is a subject of that record, not a user. We do not knowingly collect information directly from anyone under 18. A parent or guardian may ask us to remove a child's details (clause 19). If we learn that a person under 18 is using the Service, we will suspend their access while we verify their age. If confirmed, we will close their account or revoke their guest access and delete personal information collected from them, except records we are legally required to retain.

5. Ways into a family's site

There are four ways in, and they carry different rights:

Your own account, made with an email address and a password.
A personal link, which the family's owner may send you. It signs you in to your account without a password; the link itself is the credential. Links can expire and can be revoked. A link from one family will not sign you in to an existing account that belongs to families with a different owner; you will be asked to sign in yourself.
The family password, a passphrase the family's owner sets and shares. Anyone who enters it becomes a guest on that device. A guest has no account and no identity on file.
A home-screen link, which lets a signed-in relative open the site from a phone's home screen. Signing out or a password change ends it.

You must keep your password, your personal links, and your family's password to yourself, and tell the family's owner and us at once if one may have been shared beyond its intended recipient. A family's owner is responsible for whom they give the family password to.

6. Family owners, moderators, members and guests

Each family site has an owner, normally the relative who started it. The owner has the final say over that family's tree and settings. Among other things, the owner can invite and remove relatives; appoint moderators; set and change the family password; decide corrections that are not applied automatically; choose whether signed-in relatives see living relatives' full details or names only; choose whether the family's deceased ancestors may be matched on the public Find page; choose the family's public reference person (clause 12); and hide or delete photos and stories.

A moderator is a relative the owner appoints to help with these tasks. A member is a relative signed in with their own account. A guest entered the family password. Guests' corrections always go to the owner for decision, and guests can download only the deceased part of the tree.

Disagreements among relatives about what a family's tree says are for the family to resolve. If you want your own details removed, use clause 19. We may, but need not, intervene. Being a family owner or moderator does not give you ownership of another person's content or authority to consent on that person's behalf. These roles do not make you our agent. You must take reasonable steps to share access only with intended recipients and revoke access you know has been compromised.

7. Your content and your responsibility for it

“Your content” means anything you add: tree files, names, dates, places, relationships, notes, photos, captions, stories, corrections and messages. You must have the right to add it. Facts about your family belong to no one. Someone else's original writing or photographs, and a subscription database's proprietary content, are not yours to copy in. If you paste in an obituary, a transcription, or text from a subscription site, you are the one who chose to, and you confirm you had the right to.

Do not add another living person's sensitive information, such as medical details, a home address, or an identity or account number.

8. The licence you give us

You keep ownership of your content. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, with the right to sublicense to our service providers, to host, store, copy, display, adapt and distribute it in order to:

show it to your family's members and guests;
match deceased ancestors across families that have opted in (clause 12);
copy tree data (names, dates, places and relationships) into a branch tree started under clause 10;
include it in the books, exports and downloads your family generates; and
run and secure the Service, provide the AI-assisted features described in clause 9 and the Privacy Policy, and improve the Service without using your content for unrelated purposes or to train AI models.

Photos and stories you contribute are copied into another family site only with your separate authorization; we do not currently offer that copying. If we offer it, your authorization will identify the sharing permitted and explain that authorized copies may remain after you leave or delete the original contribution, and your licence will also permit us to copy and display that content there. The licence otherwise ends when your content is removed from the Service, except for limited backup retention described in our Privacy Policy. Retention remains subject to applicable law and removal under clauses 19 and 21. We and our licensors retain all rights in the Service's software, design and branding. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service for personal family-history purposes, including through the permitted API. This does not transfer ownership of user content to us.

9. Corrections, evidence and AI research

Evidence grades. Every fact and every parent–child link is graded on one scale: Proven, Probably, Possibly or Unproven, with Conflicted where the sources disagree and No evidence yet where nothing in the file speaks to it, as set out in our published standard (/trust/standard). A chain of relationships is only as strong as its weakest link, and that is the grade we show.

Corrections. Anyone with access to a family's site may propose a correction. A correction is applied automatically only when all five of these hold: it links to an image of an actual record (for example a birth, marriage or death record, a parish register, a census page, or a will) at a working web address; it does not contradict a value already recorded; it is not about a living person; it is not a parent–child link; and the person proposing it is signed in with their own account. Everything else waits for the owner.

Research. When a family asks and pays for research, an AI agent searches a fixed list of public-domain and open-access archives. It never signs in to, crawls or scrapes subscription genealogy services. Every record it reports must come from an address on that list and is cited by its web address; anything else is shown as a lead and never entered. A finding backed by a record image is applied under the same five conditions as above. Research never targets a living person. Before it searches, the agent is given what your tree already holds about the people concerned (their events, notes and sources, with the addresses they cite) and told to search only for what that leaves open. A record search (“Prove this link”) also fetches and reads the open-access records your tree cites before it searches; a link settled by one of them counts as a record found. Paid research purchases research work, not a guaranteed finding.

The report card and Prove a link. The free report card at /score grades a tree file you upload, link by link, on the same scale, with an estimated likelihood. Prove a link reads one record you send, twice and independently, and tells you whether it supports the link. Both are our assessment of the evidence (clause 3), not a finding of fact.

Help. The first answer on the Help page is written by AI. It cannot change your tree, and it passes questions to a person when it is unsure.

AI provider. To do this work we send some of your content to our AI model provider, Anthropic, as described in the Privacy Policy. AI output can be wrong. Check anything important.

10. Branch trees

If your side of the family goes beyond what your family's tree covers, you may start your own family site, seeded with your own line. That copies tree information about other people into a new site with its own owner, password and settings; photos and stories are not copied. After seeding the two trees are separate. A correction accepted on a branch, about a person both trees share, is offered back to the original family for its owner's decision; it is never applied there automatically. After copying, each family owner controls corrections in their own tree.

11. Photos and stories

Photos are available within the family site and in its books, exports and downloads, subject to the permissions described in these terms and our Privacy Policy. No public page shows a photo. A story that names or mentions a living person can never be published to a public link; we check this each time a public link is opened, not only when it is shared. The owner or a moderator can hide or delete any photo or story.

12. Living people and the public parts of the Service

Inside a family's site. A person with no death or burial record who was born within the last 110 years, or whose birth year is unknown, is treated as living. Signed-in relatives see living relatives' details only as the family's owner allows (full details, or names only). Guests' downloads exclude living people.

In public. Pages anyone can see without signing in, including Find a Cousin, share images and shared stories, apply the same test on our server: anyone with no death or burial record who was born within the last 110 years, or whose birth year is unknown, is treated as living and excluded from public display, subject to the exceptions below. Families appear publicly only by surname. Only deceased ancestors are matched across families, and only for families whose owner has opted in. Except for a reference person who has consented as described below, and a certificate holder who chooses to show their own name on their certificate's public check page (clause 16), we do not intentionally display living people publicly. Our living-status checks depend on the accuracy of the dates and records supplied to us and can be wrong. Contact us promptly if a living person has been incorrectly identified as deceased.

The reference person. A family owner may choose a deceased person as the public reference person. A living person may be named only after that person directly confirms to us that they agree to public display of their name for this purpose; this option is not currently available, so a living person is not shown as a reference person. Once it is available, a person who has given that permission may withdraw it by contacting us, and we will stop future public display under our control. We cannot recall copies previously made by others.

13. Prepaid research credit

Joining, browsing, searching, proposing corrections, and adding photos and stories are free. Research is paid for with prepaid credit, starting at $10.00, plus any sales tax, sold in packs of $10.00, $25.00, $50.00 and $100.00. Credit is sold through Link, Stripe's checkout service, which is the seller of record for each purchase, adds any sales tax at checkout, and emails your receipt; your statement shows the charge as LINK.COM* followed by our name. We never see your card number. Only the owner of a family's billing account can buy research credit for it. If checkout shows you a price in your local currency, the credit you receive is the pack's value in U.S. dollars.

Before a research job starts, you see an estimate and we reserve that amount. When the job finishes we charge what it actually used, up to the estimate, and release the rest. We never charge more than the estimate.
If a job fails before any paid work is done, the whole reservation is released. If it fails after paid work has been done, you are charged only for that work.
Credit belongs to the billing account, not to one family site. An account that owns several sites has one balance.
Refunds. You may request a refund of unused credit within 30 days after its purchase; the billing account's owner can request one from the family's Credits page. Credit properly spent on completed research is not refundable merely because the results are limited or inconclusive. This does not limit remedies for our failure to provide the purchased service or refunds or cash redemption required by law. We will avoid duplicate refunds where the same amount is subject to a card dispute. Approved refunds will be submitted to the original payment method within 10 business days. A refund also returns the sales tax paid on the refunded amount.
Link's refund policy. Because Link is the seller of record, Link's own refund policy also applies to every purchase, and where it gives you more than ours, Link's policy governs. You can ask Link for a refund through Link support (support.link.com) within 60 days of the purchase; Link decides those requests, and may ask us about them. Link answers questions about the charge itself; questions about the research, your credit or your family site come to us.
Expiry. Unused purchased credit does not expire.
Disputes. If you dispute a charge with your card issuer, Stripe handles the dispute, and the account cannot spend credit until the dispute is resolved.

Prices and taxes are shown before you pay. We may change prices for future purchases.

14. Starter trees

From the Find page, a visitor may request a free starter tree built from public records. The owner of a family site whose tree is empty may also start that tree from one grandparent, built the same way into the family's site. A starter tree no one has claimed, by making an account and taking it over, may be deleted 30 days after it was created, together with its stored files.

15. Gift trees (not currently offered)

We do not currently offer gift trees. If we offer them, this clause applies.

A buyer (the “giver”) may pay to have a family's tree researched and built as a gift. The new family site is owned by the giver. Each person the giver names (a “recipient”) receives a personal link that opens the site; links last 180 days unless the giver revokes or shortens them sooner. The giver chooses whether and when to send each link, and any message with it. We do not contact recipients.

The giver confirms that they are entitled to share the family information included, and that they will give links only to the people named. Recipients must accept these terms before accessing the Service. The research is done on the same terms as clause 9 and carries no promise about how much will be found. Before purchase, we will describe the research and tree included in the price and the expected delivery time. We do not guarantee a particular ancestor, relationship or number of records. If we cannot deliver the promised tree, you may choose a full refund or agree to a revised delivery date. Limited or inconclusive findings alone do not entitle you to a refund where we have properly completed the disclosed service, except as required by law. A recipient must accept these Terms before accessing the tree.

16. Proof of Descent certificates

A family may issue a certificate documenting a line of descent and its evidence once every link in that line meets our evidence standard. A certificate is our assessment of the evidence (clause 3); it does not certify a relationship or establish a legal fact, and we may revoke it if the evidence for it fails. A certificate has a public check page; its holder's own name appears there only if the holder chooses to show it.

Anchoring certificates on a public blockchain (Proof of Descent on Solana) is not currently offered. If we offer it, we will write nothing personal to the blockchain, any token we issue will be non-transferable, and nothing issued through that feature will be an investment; records written to a public blockchain cannot be erased.

Verified-line credentials. From the report card you may buy a credential for a line from you back to one ancestor, offered only when every link in it grades Probably or better. Prices are shown before you pay (currently $79 for the first line, $29 for each further line, $199 for every verified line in the tree, plus any sales tax). We grade the tree again when you order, and the credential records the line as it graded that day. Returning in the same browser with the same tree file, you pay $29 a line, and for a year after you bought a line you may have it reissued free as it grades then; we recognise a returning buyer by a cookie in that browser, not by an account. A credential is our assessment of the evidence (clause 3); it does not certify a relationship or establish a legal fact. It lives at a private, unguessable web address that we do not list or index; anyone you give the address to can see it. Payment runs through Link as in clause 13, and Link's refund policy applies. We will refund a credential on request within 30 days of purchase; a refunded or disputed credential is void.

17. The research API

A family's owner may issue API keys so a program can work with that family's tree. A key reaches only its own family's data, carries only the permissions the owner grants, and can be revoked at any time. The owner is responsible for everything done with a key they issue. Do not use the API to build a competing service, to resell access to the underlying AI model, or to get around rate limits. You are responsible for the permissions you grant and for keeping your API keys secure. Revoke a key promptly if you believe it has been compromised.

18. Acceptable use

Do not:

use the Service to locate, contact or harass anyone who does not want to be found;
harass, threaten or defame anyone, or impersonate anyone;
add content you have no right to add, or another living person's sensitive information;
use bots, scrapers or other automated tools outside the API, or try to get around rate limits or security;
try to see a family's site without its owner's permission, or to rebuild another family's tree from the public pages;
upload malware, or interfere with the Service; or
use our AI features in breach of Anthropic's Usage Policy (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup).

We may remove content, and suspend or close an account or a whole family site, that breaks these terms.

19. Removing your details

Anyone, whether a member, a guest, or a living relative who has never signed up, may ask for their details to be removed from a family's tree. Signed-in users can ask from their Account page; anyone may write to hello@probablycousins.com. A parent or guardian may ask on a child's behalf. A request about a person in a family's tree goes first to that family's owner, who is told a request was made; we step in if they do not act. A person handles each request by hand, usually within a few days. We may ask for reasonable information to confirm who is asking. We will assess your request across family trees and other copies under our control and remove or restrict information where required by law or our published policy. We may retain a limited record of the request to help prevent reintroduction. We will request only information reasonably needed to verify your identity and authority. We cannot retrieve copies already downloaded or printed by others.

20. Closing your account; deleting a family site

You may ask us to close your account at any time from your Account page or by writing to us; a person does it within a few days. The owner of a family site that was started from another family's site can delete it from their Account page; deletion is permanent, and records of credit bought for it move to another family site on the same account. A family's owner may ask us to close any other family site, or one the Account page cannot delete (for example, because credit was bought on its own account); we do this by hand. Closing a site removes its tree, photos, stories and sign-in list. Content copied into another family's tree as described in clauses 8 and 10 may remain, subject to removal under clauses 19 and 21 and applicable law. We may keep records we are required to keep, such as billing records, and backups are overwritten within about 7 days, as described in our Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or close an account or site that breaches these terms, or if we stop offering the Service, giving reasonable notice where we can. If your account closes or we discontinue paid research, we will refund your unused purchased credit, subject to applicable law and adjustment for amounts already returned through a payment dispute.

21. Copyright complaints

Send copyright notices to our designated agent: Copyright Agent, Probably Cousins LLC, 250 Indian Road, Palm Beach, FL 33480; hello@probablycousins.com. Your notice must include your signature; identification of the copyrighted work and material to be removed, with its location; your contact information; a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the owner, its agent or law; and a statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, you are authorized to act for the owner. We respond expeditiously to valid notices and notify the uploader of removal.

A counter-notice must include your signature, identification and former location of the removed material, a statement under penalty of perjury that removal resulted from mistake or misidentification, and your name, address and telephone number. It must also include consent to jurisdiction of the federal district court for your address, or, if outside the United States, any district where we may be found, and agreement to accept service from the complainant or its agent. We will forward a valid counter-notice to the complainant and restore material no sooner than 10 and no later than 14 business days after receiving the counter-notice unless our agent receives notice that the complainant has filed an action seeking a court order restraining the infringement. We terminate repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. We may also remove links to infringing material.

22. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. In particular, we do not warrant that any relationship we show is real, that any record found is about the person you think it is, that any date or place in a tree is accurate, or that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free. Content may be supplied by users or generated through our research tools. Neither source guarantees accuracy.

23. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, profits or goodwill. Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of US$100 and the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. These exclusions and limits do not apply to our fraud, willful misconduct or gross negligence, or to liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

24. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from content you added, your breach of these terms, or the use of an API key or personal link you issued. This obligation applies only to the extent a claim arises from your conduct described above and not from our own breach, negligence or misconduct. We will promptly notify you of the claim and reasonably cooperate at your expense. You may control the defense through reasonably acceptable counsel. No settlement may admit fault on our behalf, impose a nonmonetary obligation on us or fail to release us without our written consent.

25. Disputes, governing law and general terms

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Subject to any mandatory right to bring a claim in another court, disputes relating to the Service or these Terms must be brought in the state courts located in Palm Beach County, Florida, or the federal court serving that county, if it has jurisdiction. You and we consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts. Nothing in these Terms deprives you of consumer protections that cannot be waived under applicable law.

We will give at least 30 days' advance notice of material changes by posting a notice on the Service and emailing account holders at their registered addresses, except where law or an urgent security need requires earlier action. Changes apply prospectively. We will obtain affirmative acceptance before applying material changes to dispute-resolution terms or expanding permissions over your content. You may stop using the Service if you do not accept a change. These terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us. If any part is unenforceable, the rest stands. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. Our failure to enforce a term is not a waiver. Clauses 7, 8, 13 (as to amounts owed), 20 and 22–25 survive termination.

Each contest we run is governed by its own Official Rules, published on the contest's page; for that contest, they prevail over these terms where the two differ.