A Hmong grandmother at Ban Vinai camp, a sleeping grandchild carried on her back and two more children beside her

Peb yog ib tsev neeg

The people who remember are the oldest in the room.

Eighteen clans, scattered across four continents in a single generation. Tsev Neeg puts your family back on one map, and helps you write down the names while they can still be told to you.

Start your tree See the map

Ban Vinai refugee camp, Thailand, 1980 to 1991

What this is

A record of who belongs to whom.

Every family carries one person who knows how it all fits: which cousin belongs to which uncle, who married into the clan and who was left behind at the border. That knowledge has never been written down, and it is leaving.

This is somewhere to put it. Names, years, the city they ended up in. Enough that a grandchild in forty years can still find the way back.

Three generations of one Hmong family photographed together outside their house at Ban Vinai

An elderly Hmong woman smiling at the camera

A woman stitching a paj ntaub story cloth by hand

A mother and father holding their baby between them

A child carried in an embroidered paj ntaub baby carrier

Eighteen xeem

Start from your clan name

Your last name is your clan, so it is the fastest way in. Spellings drifted as families moved. Her and Hawj, Lee and Lis, Vang and Vaj: searching one finds them all.

Xiangkhouang to everywhere

A war, then the camps, then a city nobody had heard of.

Most of these families begin in the same handful of provinces: Xiangkhouang, Luang Prabang, Houaphanh. The photographs on this page were taken at Ban Vinai in Thailand, where tens of thousands of Hmong waited through the 1980s for somewhere to go.

Two generations later the same names are spread across four continents, and nobody has the whole picture. This is a place to assemble it.

Thatched houses on a cleared hillside at Ban Vinai, with forest behind — Ban Vinai, Loei Province

What is public, what is not

Your relatives’ details stay yours

You can keep a full address and phone number for everyone in your tree, the kind of list that usually lives in one auntie’s notebook. Nobody else can see them. Not other families, not people searching the site. That is enforced by the database itself, not by a setting you have to remember to switch on.

Public on a shared tree

First, middle and last name
City, state and country
Birth and death years
How they connect to the family

Only ever visible to you

Street address and postal code
Phone number and email
Your private notes
Every person in a private tree

Map pins sit at the centre of a city, never at a home. Read how it works

Three evenings, not three months

How it works

01
Ask while you can
Sit down with your parents and grandparents. Write down the names, the villages, the years, before that knowledge goes with them.
02
Draw the connections
Link parents, children and spouses, several at a time. The tree lays itself out generation by generation as you go.
03
Keep it, or share it
One button, private or public. Share it and a cousin in Wausau or Toulouse searching your clan name can find their way back to you.

One family, many countries

Brothers ended up in different hemispheres.

Every person is placed by city, anywhere in the world, and the map shows how many relatives are in each one. Search a city and see who is there. Search a name and see where they went.

Search public trees Open the map