Frequently Asked Questions

What is WeAre.xyz ?

WeAre.xyz is your very own online space in which you can create and share, even collaborate on, nostalgic archives relating to topics close to your heart. For each archive you create, you can choose from the following, with more to follow:

Family Archive: a collaborative digital record of your family's past, present and future.
One Place Study Archive: a collaborative digital record of any type of place, such as a house, village, town, neighborhood, county, street, national park, battlefield, heritage location, stately home... anywhere with a past that you would like to capture, share and develop for present and future generations.

How does it work?

Family Archive: at the center of your WeAre.xyz family archive is your family tree, and this is used to automatically generate all of the sections within your online family history space. Imagine an art gallery or museum in which each of your ancestral families and forebears has a whole room of their own filled with relevant information all neatly ordered into stories and research, media (photos, videos, albums, etc.), documents, notable places and occasions, and an area for cataloguing all those precious artifacts we and our relatives possess (diaries, furniture, medals, anything our ancestors have touched!).

One Place Study Archive: it's super simple; give your One Place Study a name, locate it on our 3D globe (upload a GEDCOM if you've been mapping people and families relevant to your place in a family tree builder like Ancestry), and that's it. You will have your very own online space in which to capture everything you have discovered; history, all the sub-places, interesting people, artifacts, and lots of beautiful 3D mapping options. You can even 'stitch' any map image onto the 3D globe and use an opacity slider to compare satellite versus printed map.

Public or Private

This is up to you:

Any of your archives can be totally private or made accessible to anyone (note living people and their details will always be obscured from public view). For a private archive, you can still make any discrete item public (a person, family, photo, article…), but any shared discrete item will not link to other parts of the archive.

Collaboration

Family Archive: invite relatives to sign up and choose which edit permissions to give them (from view only to full admin). They will experience the archive placing them at the center of all information; for example, they will be the home person on the main family tree, and content sections will filter to show items relevant to their family lines. You can also invite non-family; ideal for collaborating on any projects you have concerning people and families unrelated to you.

One Place Study Archive: invite archive members to collaborate on building a record of your special place. As with a Family Archive, you can set edit permissions for each member, ranging from view only to full admin.

Content Preservation for Future Generations and Peace of Mind

As long as you have invited and signed one or more members to your archive, they will never lose access, even if you were to pass away unexpectedly. All that happens if no one is paying the archive subscription is that editing is disabled until someone starts paying again. For added security and peace of mind, all archives can be fully downloaded at the click of a button. All articles are delivered as PDFs, all images and documents are provided in original quality (metadata preserved), along with an up-to-date GEDCOM file for all individuals in your archive.

Who owns the content in my archives?

You do. By putting content in your archives, you are not handing ownership to us at WeAre.xyz. You give us permission to host and serve up your content, that is all.

Can I build multiple archives each with their own specific content?

In the Archives section, you can create and delete archives to your heart’s content. You can invite people to discrete archives as opposed to all of them. Note that you may be invited to an archive started by someone else; this would be visible in your list of archives.

Who can edit what on my site?

There are five edit permission levels you can grant archive members:

SUPER ADMIN: is the ultimate authority for the archive, allowing the member to carry out any action on any member’s content.
ADMIN: is an archive member trusted by the Super Admin to both regulate and contribute to the archive.
EDITOR: is an archive member who can add content and new individuals to the family trees but cannot edit or delete other people’s content.
CONTRIBUTOR: is an archive member who can add content but cannot add new individuals to the archive.
VIEWER: is an archive member who can view only and add comments and generate questions to other archive members.

Tell me about the special Blog archive feature?

All archive members can click the Blog menu at the top of the page and then create Blogs which are hosted on the WeAre.xyz platform. You can post content from an archive to your Blogs and vice versa (i.e., you can index a blog post within an archive so it is available wherever it is relevant). This feature means you can build family trees, show 3D maps, and transcribe documents within a blog post.