Saga Book

A family tree for the stories behind the names

Every family has a storyteller. Give them a book.

Record a grandparent remembering. Saga Book writes down what they say, keeps their voice beside the words and suggests the people, dates and places they mention. You decide what joins the tree.

Were you sent a link?

Some stories exist only while someone can still tell them.

Three generations in a garden in 1942: an older woman seated, two women standing behind her and two small boys beside her.
Members of the Smith and Attree families, Toowoomba, 1942. State Library of Queensland, public domain.

Most of us can name a great-grandmother and the town she came from. Far fewer can say what she sang while she cooked, why the family moved, or who is standing beside her in the one photograph that survived.

Answers like these are rarely written down. They live with the people who were there, and they come out at the kitchen table, on a long call, at the end of a visit, when somebody finally thinks to ask.

Saga Book is made for that moment. Press record, let them talk, and keep every word where the whole family can find it.

A tree is a list of names until somebody tells you who they were.

Press record. Let them talk.

Record a story on the spot, upload a recording you already have, or type it in. Saga Book writes down what was said and keeps the audio beside the words, in English, French, Ukrainian or Russian.

  1. Record, upload or type.

    Sit down with a relative and record, bring in a recording made years ago, or write the story yourself.

  2. Their words, and their voice.

    The recording becomes a transcript you can read and correct, with the audio kept beside it, so any passage can be heard again as it was told.

  3. What they mention, suggested.

    Saga Book reads the transcript and suggests the people, dates, places and relationships it mentions, each with the sentence it came from.

  4. Nothing joins the tree until you say so.

    Accept a suggestion and it is added. Reject it and it is not. Try it on the story on this page.

  5. Find the moment it was said.

    Search every recorded story. A result opens the transcript at the passage where the words were spoken.

Sample story, invented to show how it works

Grandma Margaret

Told by Alice

Transcript

  1. My grandmother Margaret was born in 1940, in Hebden Bridge.
  2. She married Arthur in 1962, the spring after he came home from sea.
  3. My father, Thomas, was their first child. He was born in 1968.
Listen from 0:02

The recording, the transcript and the suggestions on this page are illustrations. The family is invented.

Not a chart. An oak.

Your tree begins with you. Add parents, partners and children directly, and the family is drawn as an oak that grows with it. Pull back to take in several generations at once, or move in close to read one life.

The family tree as Saga Book draws it. The twelve people on it are invented, and the six portraits are public-domain studio photographs.

It grows with the family

The more people you add, and the further back they go, the more the oak grows.

A young tree

Bring the tree you have.

Import a GEDCOM file from another program, review everything it will add, then add it. Export your tree as GEDCOM 5.5.1 whenever you like.

Mistakes are allowed.

Every change is written into the tree’s history. Undo a change, restore a person who was removed, or merge two records of the same person.

Ask for a correction in plain words.

Tell the assistant what is wrong. It shows exactly what it would change and waits for you. Nothing is applied until you agree, and the change goes into the history like any other.

Illustration

Margaret was born in 1941, not 1940.

Proposed change

Margaret Whitfield, year of birth

19401941

Every face, found and named.

Keep the family’s photographs and video beside the tree. In a group photograph Saga Book finds the faces, suggests a name when a face looks like someone already named, and lets you mark a face it missed.

A 1940 studio portrait of a mother and father with their two small sons, with a box drawn round each face.
Dale
James
The Attree family, Toowoomba, 1940. The names are the ones the State Library of Queensland records for these photographs.
  • Named by a person
  • A suggested match, waiting for a yes or a no
  • Found, not named yet
  • Missed by the detector, marked by hand

Portrait on the tree

James

A named face can become that person’s portrait on the tree.

Three women standing in front of a verandah in 1935. The two younger women have a box round their faces; the woman in the middle does not.
Alma
Doris
Elsie Smith with her daughters Alma and Doris, Toowoomba, 1935.

Faces are found and matched in your browser, on your own device. No photograph is sent to a remote AI service to be recognised.

Hand a branch to the one who knows it.

Make an invitation out to a relative’s email address and choose how far their hand reaches. Saga Book writes the message for you to send them, in the language they read.

Everyone in their own language.

Each relative can use Saga Book in English, French, Ukrainian or Russian, whichever they read best.

Were you sent a link?

Were you sent a link by a relative?

Sign in with the exact email address the message names. An invitation is matched to that address and to no other, so it will not appear under any other account.

The software suggests. A person decides.

A family’s history is made of details that matter to someone. Saga Book is built around a few rules it keeps.

  1. A person decides.

    Suggestions from a story wait until someone accepts or rejects them. A correction from the assistant is shown before it is applied.

  2. Nothing is final.

    Every change is kept in the history, so a mistake can be undone and a removed person brought back.

  3. Faces stay in the browser.

    Faces are found and matched on your own device, not by a remote service.

  4. The tree can leave with you.

    Export the whole family as GEDCOM 5.5.1, the format other genealogy programs open.

  5. Every relative in their own language.

    English, French, Ukrainian and Russian, across the interface, the recordings and the transcripts.

  6. Access is exact.

    An invitation belongs to one email address, and a relative given one branch can change that branch and nothing else.

Index

Everything on this page is in Saga Book today.

The end of this page, and the first of yours.

Begin with one name. Yours.

  1. Sign in. Your tree opens on you.
  2. Add the people you know, or bring a GEDCOM file.
  3. Record the relatives who remember, and decide what joins the tree.
  4. Invite the ones who know the rest.