Genealogy Hand-off

Works Alongside Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Your Tree

How Nostalgia fits beside the tree software you already use. Where to keep names and records, where the photo work belongs, and how the hand-off works in practice.

If you already keep a family tree in Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Gramps, or FamilyEcho, Nostalgia is not a replacement. It’s the companion that handles the part most tree software doesn’t: the photos themselves.

Tree software is for names, dates, and records. Nostalgia is for the restoration, captioning, organization, private links, and paid Family Vaults around the photos those names are attached to. Both stay where they live; you bring the right one to the right job.

The hand-off

The line between your tree tool and Nostalgia is a feature, not a limitation. Use the right tool for each side of the job:

  • Names, dates, relationships, and records — stay in your tree software. The photos attached to those names — scan quality, damage repair, and likeness preservation — happens in Nostalgia.
  • DNA matches, hints, and tree-building suggestions — stay in your tree software. Caption and story help, tags, and era estimates on every photo so the context survives the generation that knew it — happens in Nostalgia.
  • Formal citations and source documents — stay in your tree software. Private links for individual keepers and paid Family Vaults for branch-level sharing — happens in Nostalgia.
  • Subscriber-only record databases — stay in your tree software. Archive follow-through — restored versions, back-of-photo notes, people-tagging, and cross-device sync — happens in Nostalgia.
The photos in your tree (Ancestry uploads, MyHeritage albums) often stay there as a low-resolution backup. The high-quality scans, careful restorations, private links, and paid Family Vaults live in Nostalgia.

How most family historians use both

  • Tree software for the spine. The names, dates, parents, children, and source citations stay in Ancestry / MyHeritage / FamilySearch / your desktop tree app of choice.
  • Nostalgia for the photos. Scan inherited prints, restore the damaged ones, caption while memory is fresh, organize into albums, and share branch by branch.
  • One foot in each. When you finish a vault for a branch, you can drop the link into a relative’s Ancestry message, an email, or a family group chat. The vault lives at one URL; the tree stays where it is.

Read-only tree import (web)

Signed-in web users can import GEDCOM, GEDZIP, or FamilyEcho FamilyScript exports beside the photo archive. Nostalgia uses the tree to help organize photos and vaults — not to become a tree editor. There are no tree-editing fields, no relationship suggestions, and no sync back to your source tool. That work belongs in Ancestry / MyHeritage / RootsMagic / FamilySearch, and it stays there.

What we’re deliberately not building

  • Family trees. Decades of work in Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch make replacing the tree side a bad use of anyone’s time. Our job is the photos those names are attached to.
  • DNA matching. Not our lane. We won’t ask for a sample or build a match graph.
  • Record databases. FamilySearch is free and deeper than anything we could build. When the right move is a document search, we’d rather point you there than dilute the archive.
  • Public profiles or social feeds. Family photos aren’t a marketing surface. Family Vaults share only with the relatives you invite.

Related

See the family-historian overview
Works Alongside Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Your Tree · Nostalgia - Family Archive