Genealogy data that is honest about what it doesn't know.

MAXGEN is a free, open data standard for family history. Every fact carries its source and a confidence score. Conflicting evidence is kept, not deleted. Anyone can use it, build on it, or extend it. No permission required.

ReadWhat the standard is and why it exists ListenEight podcast episodes, one per schema DownloadThe seven schema files, every version

The problem it solves

Genealogy has never had more to work with. Close to two billion records are online, archives scan more every year, volunteers transcribe registers by the million, and DNA testing has added a whole new kind of evidence. The formats we exchange that work in were designed for a simpler time: one birth year, one birthplace, one set of parents, written down as settled fact. Real family history rarely arrives that clean. A census says 1843; a gravestone says 1844. A father could be one of three men with the same name.

MAXGEN writes the doubt down. It stores what the document says separately from what we think it means, keeps every claim with its source and a 0-to-1 confidence score, and never overwrites anything. Several possible parents can coexist until the evidence resolves them. Every uncertainty becomes a lead worth chasing instead of a dead end, and as each new source corroborates a name or a date you watch the confidence climb. People can read it, researchers can check it, and AI can work with it without inventing anything, because confidence is a machine's native language.

MAXGEN is built to sit alongside the archives, record sites, and communities researchers already rely on, not to replace them. It is a shared language they can all speak. Every ancestor. Every source. Every honest doubt.

The seven schemas

A schema is a written rule-set that says exactly what fields a record has and what each one means, so that any program can read a record written by any other program. MAXGEN has seven, and each has its own page and its own podcast episode.

Three promises

Nothing is ever deleted. A retracted claim gets a retraction note; it does not vanish. The audit trail is permanent.
Living people are protected by the schema itself. A record about a person who may be alive is locked private no matter what any application does.
Old records stay readable forever. Within a major version, fields are never renamed or removed. See the versioning policy.

Who it is for

Developers building genealogy tools or AI agents: seven JSON Schema files at stable addresses, a changelog, fixtures, and a validator that runs in your browser.
Genealogists and archivists deciding whether to trust it: the plain-English guide, the FAQ, and the podcasts.
Institutions who need to know how it is governed before adopting it: the governance page and the licence.

MAXGEN is short for the Maxwell Genealogy Standard, named for its author, Garlon Maxwell. It is stewarded by OpenGenealogyAI and dedicated to the public domain (CC0).