Our Stories: share a family story anyone can read.

Ancestorii has two sides, and they never mix by accident. My Family is private: only the people you invite can see what is in it. Our Stories is public: when you publish there, the story gets its own page that anyone can open, share or find through a search engine.

That split is the point. Some memories belong to the family, like the photos you would never post or a voice note of your mum telling a story one more time. Others are worth sharing beyond it, because a stranger reading about your grandad’s first job might recognise their own family in it.

Our Stories is for the second kind, and you decide, story by story, what goes there. You can see what other families have shared on the Our Stories feed.

A story is a title and your words, with as much or as little around them as you like:

• A topic, chosen from the seven. The Publish button only works once you have a topic, a title and some text.
• A preview line, if you want one. It shows on the story’s card in the feed; without one, the card shows the opening of your story.
• Up to 10 photos, including iPhone HEIC photos, which the editor accepts directly.
• One video, as an MP4, MOV or WebM file: up to 5 minutes and 20 MB on the Free plan, or up to 15 minutes on Premium.
• A voice note, recorded straight into the editor or uploaded, and converted automatically so it plays on any device.

Your story shows your display name and profile photo, plus a short title if you add one to your profile, such as ‘Retired teacher’. On a wide screen, a live preview beside the editor shows how the story will look before you publish. If you are writing something longer, our guide on how to write a life story may help.

Our Stories is only for genuine family memories: anecdotes, tributes, recipes, traditions and reflections on family life. When you press Publish, an automated check, which uses Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, reads the title and text and looks for anything outside the rules:

• religious or political content, where preaching or campaigning is the point of the story
• hate speech, harassment or discriminatory language
• spam, self-promotion or commercial content
• anything that is not really a family memory

Mentioning a church wedding, a Christmas tradition or a relative’s career in politics is fine. The check is looking for stories whose main purpose is something other than remembering.

Stories that pass go live straight away. Flagged stories are held as ‘pending review’ until a person looks at them, and the author gets an email saying so. That means not every story is read by a person before it appears, and if the automated check cannot run, the story is published anyway. Signed-in readers can report any story, for anything that slips through.

If a published story breaks the rules, a three-strike policy applies:

1. The story is removed and you get an email explaining why.
2. The story is removed, you get a final warning, and you cannot publish on Our Stories for seven days.
3. You are permanently banned from Our Stories.

Strikes only ever affect the public feed. Your private My Family library is never touched. The full standards are set out on how Ancestorii works.

Newest stories come first by default, and everyone sees the same feed: it is not personalised, and there are no follower counts. Readers can switch the order to Most Loved, which ranks stories by hearts, or Most Discussed, which ranks them by comments. Beside the feed, a Trending Stories box shows the five most-hearted stories from the latest 50, and the Ancestorii team can feature a story.

Each of the seven topics also has its own page, so a story about your grandmother’s recipes appears under Food & Recipes as well as in the main feed. You can browse them all on the Our Stories topics page.

Readers can heart a story, reply in comment threads and share it. You get a notification when they do, and an email when someone comments.

Often, yes, and it is worth a thought before a photo goes on a public page. The UK Intellectual Property Office’s copyright notice on digital images explains that the person who takes a photo is generally the first owner of its copyright, and that copyright in images lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years, although the exact period depends on when the image was made. So having the print in your family album does not make you the copyright owner.

The same notice covers the situations families meet most:

• Photos taken by relatives. Its example is photos a relative took at a recent family event, which would need the photographer’s permission to use online. In most families, that is a quick message to whoever took them.
• Studio and wedding photos. When a photographer was commissioned, copyright usually stays with the photographer. If the photos were commissioned for private and domestic purposes, the person who commissioned them also has a right to stop them being issued to the public without their permission.
• Photos with no known photographer. Copyright does not disappear just because the owner cannot be found. After a diligent search, you can apply to the Intellectual Property Office for an orphan works licence.

Photos on a published story can be seen by anyone, so add only the ones you are comfortable sharing, and check with living relatives before you post photos of them or stories about them. You keep ownership of everything you upload; Ancestorii holds only a limited licence to run the service and show what you choose to publish. This is general information, not legal advice.

Our Stories costs nothing to use, carries no ads and gives each story a page of its own that relatives can find and share. If you want help with the words, Story Assistance can ask you questions as you write; our writing help page explains how it works. And when a memory is not for strangers, it belongs on the private side instead, where the My Family feed keeps it between the people you invite.

The limits are worth knowing too. Our Stories is on the website, not in the phone app. It is a small, new community rather than a big social network, so it is a place to keep and share a story, not to build an audience. And it is public: once a story is live, anyone can read it, and like any web page it can be copied or saved, so publish only what you are happy for anyone to see.