genealogy-mcp

Family history research: 79 archives and databases, name variants, historical calendars, kinship, evidence checks, GEDCOM audit and archive-request drafts. Local Python MCP server, MIT license, no API keys required.

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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 (114 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.

The register says he was born «на Покров» 1885, the year is written ҂аѡ҃пе.

cyrillic_numerals reads the year (1885), feast_date gives 1 October (Julian) = 13 October 1885.

We share 230 cM with a match on MyHeritage. Who could she be?

dna_match: second cousin, first cousin twice removed, half first cousin… — and why only documents can decide.

Where are the parish registers of Volhynia governorate now?

where_are_records: the state archives of Zhytomyr (the consistory), Rivne and Volyn — borders moved, so it is not always the archive of today's region.

Remember what we found, and continue next week.

A research project on your computer: people, sources with full citations, open leads and a log of every search — including "nothing found" — so nobody searches the same place twice. GEDCOM in and out.

Write what we found into our family site.

If your family archive is a gene-archive site, give the project tools the path of its folder: the assistant reads the archive itself — who is missing, which dates have no document — and every change it makes goes through the site's own checks, lands in its corrections and research logs, is committed to git under your name and rebuilds the site. It shows the change first and writes only after your yes.

Why use it

Without it	With genealogy-mcp
The assistant names two or three famous websites	114 sources chosen by country, years and kind of record, each with "how to search it well"
Searches one spelling	Spelling variants, pre-1918 orthography, male/female forms, 9 transliteration systems, given-name equivalents (Иван = Іоаннъ = Jan = Johann = Juan)
Invented or broken URLs	Ready search links built from tested URL templates; a weekly job checks every site
"This is probably your ancestor"	An explicit evidence rule: a namesake is not a relative
Dates taken at face value	Julian ↔ Gregorian, birth years from ages with realistic drift, dates normalised to GEDCOM
Generic advice	Record guides: parish registers, confession lists, revision lists, household books, WWI/WWII, repression files, passenger lists, censuses, European civil registration, Latin American records
You write to archives from scratch	Request drafts for Russian ZAGS, state, military and FSB archives, and for any archive in English, Spanish or Portuguese
It forgets everything between chats	A research project that remembers people, sources, leads and every search
It cannot read old numbers and dates	Church Slavonic numerals, church feasts, Julian, Hebrew and French Republican calendars
"Search FamilySearch for your name"	Live search in the Internet Archive full text, WikiTree, Open Archives and Wikidata place history
DNA matches are a mystery	Shared cM → the relationships it fits

Everything runs on your computer. The server goes online only when the assistant runs a live search (search_online, place_history), and then sends that query to that one site.

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, Finnish Digital Archive, Hungaricana, Acta Publica (Czechia), Bulgarian state archives, FreeCEN, FreeREG, The National Archives, GRO, Welsh Newspapers.
Germany and German-speaking lands: WWI casualty lists, GEDBAS, Online-OFB, German Digital Library, Bundesarchiv, Baltic Biographical Lexicon, Black Sea Germans (Odessa3), Poznań Project, Metryki.
Jewish genealogy: JRI-Poland, Gesher Galicia, LitvakSIG, JewishGen, Yad Vashem, Steve Morse One-Step tools.
Caucasus and Central Asia: National Archives of Georgia, the central state archives of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
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, USGenWeb, Library and Archives Canada, BAnQ (Quebec), Pier 21.
Australia and New Zealand: Trove, National Archives of Australia, Papers Past, New Zealand BDM.

Record guides in English, Russian and Ukrainian, the main ones also in Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and German.

Install

Claude Desktop, one click: download genealogy-mcp-<version>.mcpb from the latest release and open it — Claude Desktop installs it and asks where to keep your research projects.

For the other ways you need uv (it fetches Python and the package by itself).

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "genealogy": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["genealogy-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code:

claude mcp add genealogy -- uvx 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… ]}}}.

Docker: docker build -t genealogy-mcp . then docker run -i --rm genealogy-mcp (stdio) or docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 genealogy-mcp --http --host 0.0.0.0 (HTTP at /mcp).

Your gene-archive site as the project: install the server together with gene-archive — pip install "genealogy-mcp[site]" or uvx --from "genealogy-mcp[site]" genealogy-mcp (the gene command is found on PATH or next to the server's Python; elsewhere set GENE_CMD), then name the folder in GENEALOGY_MCP_SITES (or in the Claude Desktop extension settings), or just give its path to the assistant. GENE_AUTHOR sets the name in the git history (default: git config user.name).

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.

The package is on PyPI and in the official MCP Registry (io.github.igormel81/genealogy-mcp): uvx genealogy-mcp installs and runs it.

Tools

Tool	What it does
`plan_research`	A step-by-step plan for a country and period: which records exist, guides, sources in order
`find_sources`	Sources by country/region (`europe`, `latin_america`, `russian_empire`…), years and record kind
`source_details`	One source: coverage, access, how to search
`where_are_records`	Which archives now hold the records of a historical province (Russian Empire, Poland, Galicia, Bukovina, East Prussia, the Baltics, the Caucasus)
`search_links`	Ready search URLs for a name and its variants
`search_online`	Live search: Internet Archive full text, Chronicling America, WikiTree, Open Archives, Open List
`place_history`	Wikidata: what a village belonged to over the years, coordinates, Wikipedia article
`name_variants`	Spelling, old orthography, gendered forms, transliterations, Daitch–Mokotoff codes, given-name equivalents (incl. Yiddish and Hebrew), patronymics
`normalize_date`	"около 1899", "9 de octubre de 1899" → `ABT 1899`, `9 OCT 1899`
`convert_calendar`	Julian ↔ Gregorian, Hebrew, French Republican
`feast_date`	«на Покров», «после Петрова поста», Easter, Wielkanoc… → the date in a given year
`cyrillic_numerals`	҂аѡ҃п ↔ 1880
`birth_year_from_age`	The birth-year range from an age in a record
`kinship`	The name of a relation in ru/en/ro, with the expected DNA share
`dna_match`	Shared cM → the relationships it fits (Shared cM Project 4.0)
`check_match`	Is a found record our person? A verdict with every fact compared (Hispanic double surnames too)
`audit_tree`	Impossible facts, duplicates and gaps in a GEDCOM or `family_tree.json`
`project_view`, `project_save`, `project_log`, `project_transfer`	The research project between conversations: people, families, sources, leads, the search log, GEDCOM import/export — or a gene-archive site folder, written through its checks and logs
`draft_archive_request`	A request letter to a registry office or archive
`record_guide`	How to read and find a kind of record
`glossary`	Old Russian record terms explained

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

The server sends nothing anywhere by itself. A live search (search_online, place_history) sends the query — names, years, place — to the one site searched. Research projects are files on your computer (~/Documents/genealogy-mcp or GENEALOGY_MCP_HOME); on a shared HTTP server they are switched off.
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.

Benchmark

evals/tasks.json holds 32 questions with checkable answers: dates by church feasts, Julian, Hebrew and Republican calendars, Cyrillic numerals, Daitch–Mokotoff, DNA, kinship, old terms, archives of historical provinces, evidence checks, record history. evals/check_tools.py runs in CI and checks that the tools answer all of them correctly. evals/run.py asks a Claude model the same questions without the server and with it and scores both (needs an API key; it costs money, so it is run by hand: Actions → Benchmark).

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.