With the demise of The Master Genealogist (TMG) in 2014 the genealogical community  lost its last high-end product for the serious researcher. Stand-alone genealogical software packages are no longer commercially viable, and the commercial market has moved almost entirely to online products sold as part of a subscription to large family history websites. This is advantageous for the service provider, as it allows them to monetise your family history data, but many serious researchers lament the loss of the control, feature richness, and personal privacy that a stand-alone product can provide.

Historians are very poorly served by the commercial software market, and frequently find themselves locked into expensive or inflexible academic or cultural sector packages.

There is a significant level of overlap in the needs of genealogists and historians, and we believe that a single package based on common data structures could gain wide acceptance, particularly a package that is free and open source.