Ancestry — the genealogy giant with more than three million paying subscribers — recently added document upload to Ask AncestryAI. You can scan an old census record, a marriage certificate, a passenger manifest, and ask the AI questions about it. For genealogy research, that's a real product. Historical context, name resolution, suggested next records to look for — Ancestry's AI is good at exactly that kind of question.

Look at the document upload field, though, and a different pattern emerges. People aren't just uploading 1881 census pages. They're uploading their own wills, their parents' insurance policies, their own tax slips. The same family-records instinct that brought them to Ancestry is showing up against a tool that wasn't designed for those documents.

Ancestor documents vs. living documents

There's a distinction worth drawing. Ancestor documents are records of people no longer here — census pages, marriage certificates, immigration records, obituaries. The AI question against an ancestor document is contextual: who was this person, what was their world, where did they go next.

Living documents are records of people still here — wills, insurance policies, tax slips, medical records, powers of attorney, the deed to the cottage. The AI question against a living document is operational: what does my mother's will say about the cottage, when does my passport expire, what's actually covered by our home insurance, who has signing authority on Dad's account.

Those are different questions. They need different products.

Why AncestryAI isn't the right shape for living documents

First, framing. AncestryAI treats every document as a historical artifact. Ask it about your father's will and you'll get genealogy-style context — names extracted, places noted, suggested research paths. What you won't get easily is "who's the named executor, what are the residuary beneficiaries, when was the most recent codicil signed." Those are operational queries the product wasn't built around.

Second, privacy. AncestryAI's documents sit in the same general pool as the rest of Ancestry's records. There's no privacy isolation layer between the will you uploaded last night and the language model that answers questions about it. For a public 1900 census record, that's fine. For your father's current will, it's a different category of file.

Third, sharing. Ancestry accounts are individual. Your sibling has their own subscription, their own tree, their own uploads. There's no shared family workspace where Mom uploads her will once and her three adult children can each ask questions about it from their own logins.

What a tool for living documents actually needs

It needs a shared family vault so one upload serves the whole household. It needs PII redaction between the document and the model, because the documents in scope contain SINs, account numbers, and full legal names. It needs expiry tracking — a passport renewal is a different shape of event than a 1920 census entry. And it needs to be hosted under the law you live under, which for Canadian families means PIPEDA, not US data residency.

Archevi was built around that list. We don't compete with Ancestry on genealogy — that's their world. We're the answer for the other half of the family record: the documents that have to work today, this week, this year, for the people still here.

Keep both

If you're using Ancestry for genealogy, keep using Ancestry for genealogy. They're excellent at it and we don't try to replace that. For your wills, your insurance, your tax slips, your medical records — the documents your family needs to operate, not just to remember — that's where Archevi fits.