genealogy-mcp — find your family history with any AI assistant

Русская версия

An MCP server that turns Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP-capable assistant into a careful genealogist. It knows where the records of your ancestors are (79 archives and databases across Russia and the former USSR, Europe, the British Isles, the USA and Latin America), how to search them (name variants, transliterations, old spelling, the Julian calendar), and when a find really is your person — so the assistant gives you working links and a plan instead of confident guesses.

Built from years of real research for an open family archive (igoruan.ru/gene, engine: gene_archive): parish registers, revision lists, WWI and WWII databases, repression files, emigration records — and every trap we fell into along the way.

What you can ask

My great-grandfather Ivan Kolodin was born about 1885 near Bogoroditsk, Tula province. Where do I look?

The assistant makes a plan for Russia 1880–1945, reads the record guides, builds the name forms (Колодин / Колодина / Колодинъ / Kolodin / Kołodin…), gives you search links for FamilySearch, the Internet Archive full text and the Russian war databases, tells you which archive holds the parish registers and drafts the request.

Is this baptism record the same Ivan? It says «Іоаннъ, father Петръ, 1887, Сынково».

check_match compares fact by fact with name variants and age tolerance: two independent facts beyond the name → confirmed; one → probable; a contradiction → find a third document.

What is my grandmother's cousin's daughter to me? И как это по-русски?

kinship → «троюродная сестра… / first cousin once removed» — in Russian, English and Romanian, with the expected DNA share.

Check my tree. (a GEDCOM from Ancestry, MyHeritage, Gramps, Geni…)

audit_tree finds the impossible (born after the mother's death, a mother aged 10, death before birth), possible duplicates and gaps — a to-do list for the next search.

Why use it

Everything runs on your computer. The server makes no network requests: it does not see your searches and sends nothing anywhere.

Coverage

• Worldwide: FamilySearch (records and the catalogue of unindexed images), Internet Archive full text, MyHeritage, Geni, WikiTree, Find a Grave, BillionGraves, Arolsen Archives, Yad Vashem, JewishGen, Matricula, Geneanet, Wikipedia.
• Russia and the USSR: Yandex Archive, archive guides, VGD forum, Pamyat Naroda, OBD Memorial, gwar.mil.ru, Open List, Immortal Barrack, Returned Names, PSTGU martyrs, Presidential and National Electronic Libraries, historical libraries, old maps, church history, RIA-1914, regional archives, ZAGS, TsAMO, RGVIA, RGIA, GARF.
• Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Poland, the Baltics: national archive portals and catalogues, TsDIAK, Geneteka, Szukajwarchiwach, epaveldas, Raduraksti, the Estonian archives.
• Europe: ICRC WWI prisoners, CWGC, Volksbund, ScotlandsPeople, FreeBMD, Irish civil and census records, Archion, GenWiki, FranceArchives, Mémoire des hommes, Antenati, PARES, Digitarq, Open Archives (NL), Belgian State Archives, Riksarkivet, Digitalarkivet, Danish Family Search, HisKi, Hungaricana.
• The Americas: FamilySearch Latin America, AGN Mexico, Arquivo Nacional and Museu da Imigração (Brazil), Hemeroteca Digital, CEMLA and AGN (Argentina), Archivo Nacional (Chile), NARA, Ellis Island, Chronicling America.

Install

You need uv (it fetches Python and the package by itself).

Claude Desktop — Settings → Developer → Edit Config, add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "genealogy": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/igormel81/genealogy-mcp", "genealogy-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code:

claude mcp add genealogy -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/igormel81/genealogy-mcp genealogy-mcp

Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json), Windsurf, Cline — the same mcpServers block as for Claude Desktop. VS Code (.vscode/mcp.json): {"servers": {"genealogy": {"command": "uvx", "args": [ …same… ]}}}.

Clients that connect over HTTP (ChatGPT connectors, remote agents): run genealogy-mcp --http --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 behind HTTPS and add https://your-host/mcp. In HTTP mode audit_tree takes the GEDCOM text only, never a file path.

Once the package is on PyPI, uvx genealogy-mcp is enough.

Tools

Resources: genealogy://sources (the catalogue), genealogy://guide/research/{en|ru} (a full research guide), genealogy://guide/prompts/{en|ru} (ready requests for each step), genealogy://records/{topic}, genealogy://glossary. Prompts: start research, check a find, transcribe a record, write to an archive.

Privacy and honesty

• Nothing leaves your machine; the server has no network code. The assistant you use is a separate service with its own privacy policy — think before pasting details about living people.
• Letters are drafts: you check and send them.
• The rules the assistant gets: cite the original, keep conflicting versions, mark guesses as "probably", never link a namesake without evidence.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for source fields and contribution guidelines. A source is missing or a link moved? Edit tools/make_sources.py, run python3 tools/make_sources.py and python3 -m unittest discover tests, open a pull request. Record guides live in src/genealogy_mcp/guides.py.

See also

• gene_archive — an open-source engine for a family archive website: tree, stories, documents, map, GEDCOM, an online editor and relatives' comments.

MIT License.