Genealogy software that treats your evidence like it matters.
Heartwood is a free, local-first desktop research bench where your evidence — not just your conclusions — is the primary object. Built for researchers who want to know why their tree says what it says.
AI can't put anything in your tree without you seeing it.
Bring your own AI — Claude Desktop, or any MCP-capable client you choose — and let it help transcribe records, extract claims, and suggest where to look next. Everything an AI produces lands in a visibly separate pending lane, shown beside the source it came from, and stays out of your tree until you review and confirm it. That's structural, not a promise: unconfirmed content cannot feed your conclusions or your exports. A full activity log shows you exactly what your AI did and when.
What Heartwood is
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Free — really
No subscriptions, no tiers, no accounts, no sign-in. Download it and use it.
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Local-first
No cloud, no servers of ours. Your data lives on your disk, in plain files you can copy, back up, and walk away with at any time. We never see it — see the privacy policy.
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Evidence-first
Sources, citations, and the claims they make are the spine of the data model — the methodology of the Genealogical Proof Standard and Evidence Explained, built into the engine rather than bolted on.
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Bring your own AI
Connect the AI you already trust — like Claude Desktop — through MCP, the open standard AI apps use to work with your tools, entirely on your machine. Your evidence goes only to the model you personally chose — never through us.
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A documented local API
Heartwood is closed source, but it isn't a black box: the app exposes a documented local API — the same surface its own features use — so any tool you trust can build on your data, on your machine. Read the docs.
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A research dashboard
Import your GEDCOM and Heartwood shows you where to dig next — people without sources, conclusions without evidence, dates that can't all be true, lines that end abruptly. Your work so far is honored; the frontier is illuminated.
How it works
Heartwood is a desktop app for macOS (Windows is coming). Import a GEDCOM file from your current tool — the import is immediate, your original file is kept byte-for-byte, and existing citations are honored. Work your research questions with sources and citations attached as you go; conflicts between records are kept visible instead of silently resolved. If you connect an AI assistant, it proposes — you decide. Everything stays on your machine, in files you own.
Heartwood is in early alpha and under very active development — public builds aren't up yet, but they're close. The features & roadmap page says plainly what works today and what's still being built — we'd rather undersell than surprise you.