Connect Claude or another MCP assistant to your family tree

Draw My Tree speaks the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that lets AI assistants and other tools connect to apps. Connect an MCP-compatible assistant and it can read your tree, search for people, and help you record sourced findings, all scoped to your own account.

Any client that supports remote MCP servers can connect, including AI chats, IDE extensions and command-line tools.

What an assistant can do

Once connected, the assistant has a set of family-tree tools:

Read and search: fetch a tree, look up a person with their events and media, or search people by name.
Walk relationships: list ancestors or descendants, find the relationship path between two people, or their closest common ancestor.
Build timelines: assemble a chronological view for one person or the whole tree.
Find gaps: scan for missing birth and death dates, birth places, parents, events, attached media or links, and life stories.
Record sourced findings: add or update people, attach citations, and log dated events such as census, burial, or marriage records.
Import and export: bring in a GEDCOM or JSON file, or export your tree as JSON, GEDCOM or CSV.
Change and remove: create, rename and delete trees (a deleted tree goes to Trash for 30 days), merge duplicate people, delete people, events and media, and replace a whole tree from an import file.
Check who can see a tree: list the people it is shared with and whether its public link is on. Sharing itself stays with you: inviting someone or turning the public link on is done in Draw My Tree, never by the assistant.

Many clients also offer the server's ready-made prompts, often as slash commands: find research gaps, write a sourced life story for a person, and summarize a family line. Pick one, name the tree and the person, and the assistant starts from the right record. Each tool also tells your client whether it only reads, adds, or changes and removes data, so the client can ask you before anything is changed.

A worked example

A short session: the assistant finds what is missing, then records one sourced fact.

You

Which people in my tree have the least recorded about them?

Assistanttree_get_research_gaps

Twenty-three people have gaps. The thinnest are Margaret Ellery (no birth date, no birth place, no parents, nothing attached) and her husband John (no death date, nothing attached). Margaret is where I would start: with no parents recorded, the line stops at her.

You

I found her in the 1900 census in Plattsburgh, New York. Born March 1856, living with John and three children. Record it.

Assistanttree_record_finding

Recorded. Birth date March 1856 and birth place New York on Margaret, a census event dated 1900 at Plattsburgh, Clinton County, and the census attached as a source. Her story now reads "…born in New York in March 1856 [1900 census](cite:…)", so the claim links to the record it came from.

Everything written came from the record you gave it, and the assistant said what it changed. The citation is a link inside the story, so the claim can still be traced to the census page later.

Read what it records before you rely on it. It writes with your permissions, like a relative you gave edit access to.

Before you start

A Draw My Tree account on the Family Plan. Free accounts and the one-time Keepsake don't include the assistant connection: the assistant can still sign in, and tells you the connection needs the plan when you ask it about your tree.
An MCP client that supports remote (HTTP) servers with sign-in. Check your client's connector or integrations settings.

Connect your assistant

Copy the server URL below, then add it as a custom connector in your client. The chat buttons open the right settings page for you; Cursor and VS Code install in one click.

Server URL

https://api.drawmytree.com/v1/mcp

Open in an AI chat

Each button copies the URL and opens that client's connectors settings. Add a custom connector, paste the URL, and sign in with your Draw My Tree account.

Most chats need a paid plan to add a custom connector. ChatGPT additionally requires turning on Developer Mode (Settings → Connectors → Advanced), available on its paid plans only.

Coding tools

Cursor and VS Code install in one click from these links.

Add to Cursor Add to VS Code

Doing it by hand instead? In your client, add a remote (HTTP) MCP server (some clients call it a “custom connector”), paste the URL above and sign in with your Draw My Tree account when asked. After it connects, the client lists the family-tree tools and you can start asking it to read or update your tree.

What the assistant can see

The connection acts as you, on the trees you own. The assistant can read, change and delete them, so treat it like giving someone access to your account. Trees other people have shared with you are not reachable through it, even ones you can edit in the app.

Disconnect an assistant

Open Account settings and find Connected assistants. It lists each assistant that has used your account, with when it connected and when it was last used. Select Revoke next to one: it loses access to your trees from its next request, even if it signs in again. Allow again gives it back.

Then remove the connector in your MCP client too, so it stops trying to reach your account.

Working with sources

When the assistant records a fact, ask it to cite where the fact came from. Its tools are built to attach a source link and any dated records alongside the claim, so each addition keeps its provenance. Without a source, you can't trace the claim later.