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Much of a family’s history lives in the memories of its oldest relatives, in boxes of photographs and papers, and in a tree that one person keeps for everyone else. When they die, what they remembered goes with them, and the archive stays with whoever built it.

People already spend money and years of work on genealogy services. Those services grew up around searching historical records; Saga starts from what a family holds itself.

Much of the world’s family history was never kept the way genealogy software expects. Chinese families have kept written genealogies, jiapu, for centuries, and Korean clans keep their jokbo. In the Gulf, a family’s lineage, its nasab, lives in Arabic name chains, and its dates are often kept in two calendars. These traditions, and the families who carry them abroad, have had few tools made for them.

In June 2025, Apple opened the on-device model behind Apple Intelligence to every app: it runs on the iPhone itself, works when the phone is offline, and was built with privacy. From launch, Saga will transcribe stories and sort documents on the device, and its second phase, asking questions of a family’s history, will build on Apple Intelligence.

Populations are aging, and the generation that holds the oldest family memories is larger than it has ever been.

Saga starts with one person, the family’s keeper, who brings in the tree they already have, builds it relative by relative, or records the stories of a parent or grandparent. Families will find Saga through family.

The first phase, at launch, brings Saga to iPhone and iPad with family accounts: relatives will join the family’s saga and grow it together, and in time pass it on to the next generation. A relative who’d rather look first can be sent a copy to read, and begin a saga from it. Next, a family will be able to ask questions of its history with Apple Intelligence, each answer drawn only from the saga’s sources. Then comes a web platform where family sagas connect through the people they share: a marriage joins two families, and each family’s saga stays its own. Android follows. The last phase is family history discovery: searching historical records and connecting a saga to archives.

• A genealogy platform. Keepsake apps gather one relative’s stories over a year and print them as a book. Saga will hold the whole family across generations, with second marriages, adopted children, and parents nobody could name.
• Stories in their place. A recorded story will belong to the person who told it and to the moment it’s about, on the family’s timeline beside the documents of that time.
• With the family. What people add to Saga will live on their iPhone or iPad and in their iCloud, only they will decide who sees it, and their saga can leave with them as a file.
• Traditions side by side. Regional apps each serve one tradition. Saga is built for all of them from launch: kinship will be read in each viewer’s own system, and places will keep the names they had at the time, so a Korean clan line, an Arabic name chain, and a Russian patronymic will sit in the same kind of saga.
• Evidence kept. When two sources disagree, Saga will keep both, each with its source, and a disproved lead will keep the reason it was dropped.
• Real voices only. Saga will never generate a relative’s voice or a digital twin to answer for them.

Alexander Toporov, Saga’s founder, is a historian and a designer. Saga started with his father’s genealogy: 8,000 people and 1,800 families across 500 years, traced over twenty years. When his father died, the archive came to Alexander and stayed in his iCloud for years, where the rest of the family could neither read it nor add to it.

Saga will put a family’s research and its stories in one saga that relatives can open on their own iPhone or iPad and add to. His aim reaches past one family: as sagas connect, archives like his father’s will become chapters in a larger history, told family by family. He is building and launching the first version himself.

Read the founder’s note

It has the market, the business model, and the roadmap in full. We’ll send it on request.