Sign in with Apple — one tap, no password to invent. The story of what Witness does now plays before you create an account, with the price stated plainly. Managing your subscription, unsubscribing from the weekly email, and deleting your account are all built into the app now. And screens with nothing to show finally say why.

Home is now this week's issue Each Monday a new edition is set — the same one on every device you own. Each part of Witness files exactly one piece into it: a lead life placed in its historical moment, a single curiosity from the Tree Check, the Archives' waiting count, one pattern your family made — an ocean crossed, a migration begun. One is inviting where hundreds would be a chore; a thin week simply prints fewer pieces. And once you tap into a piece, the issue follows you: a slim band on every person's page offers the next piece, however deep the reading has wandered. The Portrait learns to say where you are A person's page now carries its own instruments. The record line ends with a compass on your direct line — "gen 7 · father's side." Above the family register, a running head: "House of Stephen Gates & Anne Neave · fourth of 13 children." The birthplace is a doorway to everyone recorded there; the register ends at the household drawn as a length of time on the Family Stage; and the Tree Check's open curiosities about this person appear on their page, worded as prompts, not problems. One Map, near and far Nearby has folded into the Map, where it belonged: a Near me chip swaps between the whole world of your tree and who has history around where you're standing. Four tabs now — Home, Tree, Explore, Map — each with one job. Patterns in your family Where the family began, the moves it made, the oceans it crossed, and the couples who turned out to be kin — four findings behind one door on Explore, and the source of the front page's weekly pattern. Your reading, kept Each week's printed pieces are recorded as back issues — carried across to the new tree alongside your research briefs, archive verdicts, and home person. On iPad, Witness now opens in its full reading layout — the rail, the masthead, this week's issue set wide — the same edition the web app prints.

Every relative, placed at a glance Wherever people are listed, a small mark now tells you how they relate: an up-and-down arrow for your direct line, a drop for blood relatives beyond it, no mark for kin by marriage. Beneath every name runs the line of descent — “Daughter of William Towne and Joanna Blessing.” And a new setting, Who gets featured, lets you choose whether the digest, the Sunday reminder, and “Related” filters celebrate your direct line only or every blood relative. Nothing is ever hidden — it just isn’t celebrated. The Field Guide Every screen, explained: annotated walkthroughs of the whole app, one tap away from You, from Questions & Answers, and from the ? on the app’s densest screens. The Family Stage finds its way home “← Families” now returns you to the Register in one tap, however deep you’ve wandered through the generations. Your original file, kept safe When you import a tree, Witness now keeps your original GEDCOM file encrypted on our servers. The key is created on your iPhone and never leaves it — which means we store your file but genuinely cannot read it. You’ll get a recovery code the first time; save it, and you can bring your file back on any device. If you lose both the phone and the code, that file can’t be opened again, by you or by us. That’s the trade for a promise we can actually keep. You can also restore a tree from that stored original at any time, from You. Choosing which tree you’re looking at If you have more than one tree, you can now pick which one Witness is reading. Explore’s search, the Register and the Archives all follow your choice instead of quietly guessing. Deleting a tree tells the truth Deleting a large tree now shows what it’s working through, and says so plainly if it doesn’t finish — rather than reporting success it hadn’t earned.

Witness 1.2 puts the family at the center of a person's page. • The Portrait — a person now opens as a portrait of their family rather than a tab bar. Parents, brothers and sisters in true birth order, and each marriage with its children, every name tappable onward. "Who were Patrick's siblings?" is answered on the page you are already reading. • Their Story and Their World now open in place, one at a time, so reading a life no longer navigates you away from the family around it. • Search by place, not just by name. One box: type "Worcester" and Witness finds everyone with an event recorded there, each result tagged with the place that surfaced them — then tap straight through to their Portrait. • Large trees load roughly twice as fast. Tree Health, the Map, and the Tree tab now fetch in parallel instead of one page at a time. On a real 8,600-person tree the heaviest load dropped from 11 seconds to just over 4 — the difference is widest on cellular. Plus multiple smaller improvements and bug fixes

Witness 1.1 is a broad redesign around one idea: your family tree should be worth opening even when you're not actively researching. • A new five-tab layout — Home, Tree, Explore, Map, and Nearby. Home is now a daily feed drawn from your own tree: anniversaries, curiosities, and a featured life each day. • Tree Health — twenty-two data-integrity checks that read your whole tree for missing sources, impossible dates, and other details worth a second look. Adapted from the checks genealogists have refined in FTAnalyzer. • The Family Stage — pick a household and scrub through time: watch children arrive, grow, and leave as the years roll past. • The National Archives — Witness now sweeps the U.S. National Archives Catalog for records that may belong to people in your tree, and gathers the candidates for you to review. • A proper forgot-password flow and a redesigned sign-in screen. Plus multiple smaller improvements and bug fixes