Terms of use

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the Nearest & Dearest family tree design application and related websites and services (the "Service"), formerly Dearest Forever. The Service is operated by Nearest & Dearest LLC, a Utah limited liability company ("Nearest & Dearest," "we," "us," or "our").

By accessing or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with a parent or legal guardian's consent.

2. Accounts and security

You may need an account to use certain features. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials and for all activity under your account. You agree to provide accurate information and keep it up to date.

3. Your content

The Service may allow you to input, upload, store, and edit content such as names, relationships, dates, places, notes, and photos ("User Content").

You represent and warrant that:

• You have the rights and permissions needed to provide User Content to the Service
• Your User Content does not violate any law or the rights of any person (including privacy rights)
• If you include information about living people, you have permission to do so

If someone contacts us asking to be removed from a tree you created, we may pass the request on to you, and we may remove or restrict access to the affected information where we reasonably believe we are required to. We will tell you if we do.

If a print you order carries the scan code, scanning it opens the tree online. By default only the people given access to the tree can see it, and anyone else holding the print can see the tree’s name and ask for access; the tree’s owner can instead let anyone holding the print see it. The code is printed and cannot be changed, only switched off, and a page someone already opened can stay viewable for up to two hours.

4. License you grant to us

You retain ownership of your User Content. You grant Nearest & Dearest a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, modify (for formatting and display, and as the photo tools you use describe), and use your User Content only as necessary to:

• Operate, maintain, and secure the Service
• Create and render your family tree designs and previews
• Enlarge your photos for print, and change them as the photo tools you use describe (such as removing a background or colorizing), including through the service providers described in our Privacy Policy
• Compose short biographies of people on your tree who have died, for features you turn on, including through the service providers described in our Privacy Policy
• Read an obituary you add and suggest facts from it for you to review, including, for the biographies of a printed tree, through the service providers described in our Privacy Policy
• Make the puzzles, games and calendars generated from your tree
• Send the family email to you, and to the people your tree is shared with who sign up for it
• Fulfill orders you request (including printing and shipping)
• Provide customer support and resolve issues
• Find and fix mistakes in, and improve, the way the Service builds trees, pages and biographies
• Prevent abuse, fraud, or security incidents

This license does not let us sell your User Content, use it in our marketing without your permission, or use it to train AI models, and our service providers may not use it to train theirs. It lasts while your User Content is in the Service and ends when you delete it, except as our Privacy Policy describes (such as backups that age out on their own and records we must keep by law), and except for what has already been printed, emailed or shared at your direction.

5. Data storage and deletion

The Service may store your projects so you can return and reorder later. If you choose to keep your project data stored with us, you do so voluntarily and authorize us to store that data to provide the Service. We use reasonable safeguards, but no system is risk-free.

You can delete an individual tree from inside the designer, and your whole account from Account settings, at any time and without asking us. If you cannot sign in, email team@nearestdearest.com from the address on your account and we will do it for you; we may ask you to verify your identity. We may retain certain information as required by law or for legitimate business purposes (e.g., transaction records, dispute prevention, and security logs). Backups may persist for a limited period, and deleted photographs are destroyed 30 days after deletion as described in our Privacy Policy.

6. Purchases

Everything Nearest & Dearest sells is a printed physical product — framed and unframed prints, and printed keepsakes such as puzzle booklets — shipped to you. We do not sell digital downloads. If you purchase through the Service, you agree to provide accurate billing and shipping information. Prices, taxes, and shipping fees (if any) will be shown at checkout.

Our Gonna-Love-It Guarantee: if you are not happy with a print for any reason, you may return it within 30 days of delivery for a full refund of what you paid for that order. Return shipping is yours to pay. If a print arrives damaged or defective, tell us within 7 days of delivery and send a photo of the problem, and we will replace it free of charge or refund you in full, without needing the print back. An order that has not yet been sent to print may be cancelled for a full refund. A refund is paid to whoever paid for the order. See our Returns & refunds page for how to start a return.

Some of what we make is free: the puzzles, games and calendars generated from your tree, which you print yourself, and any sample files we publish. These are provided at no charge, are not a sale, and nothing in this section applies to them. We may change or withdraw free features at any time.

7. Fulfillment and third parties

We may use third-party service providers to help us operate the Service and fulfill orders: hosting and storage, payment processing, shipping, printing and framing, email delivery, live chat, website analytics, and AI services that help write the biographies on the page behind a print’s code and read the obituaries they draw on. We share only the information reasonably necessary for each. What the analytics and chat providers receive, and how to switch them off, is set out in section 6 of our Privacy Policy.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for unlawful, harmful, or abusive purposes
• Upload malware or attempt to interfere with the Service
• Access the Service in an unauthorized way or attempt to bypass security
• Get around the access controls on a tree or on the page behind a print’s code or tag, for example by guessing codes or links, or reach a tree you have not been given access to
• Scrape, crawl, or collect content or data from the Service by automated means such as bots, scripts or scrapers, or copy it in bulk, except that search engines may index our public pages as our robots.txt file allows
• Copy, decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer the Service or any part of it, or attempt to derive its source code, rules, data or methods (including how it writes biographies), except to the extent the law allows this despite this restriction
• Copy, extract, or republish the Service’s puzzles, games or calendars or the historical data it draws on, other than printing and sharing what the Service makes for you as section 9 allows
• Use the Service, or anything it makes, to build or train a competing product, a dataset, or an AI model
• Frame or mirror the Service on another website, or resell or sublicense access to it
• Impersonate others or misrepresent your identity

9. Intellectual property

The Service (including software, branding, and non-user templates/design elements, the way it writes biographies and makes puzzles, games and calendars, and its compilations of historical data) is owned by Nearest & Dearest and protected by intellectual property laws. You may not copy, modify, distribute, or create derivative works from the Service except as permitted by these Terms or by our written permission.

What the Service makes for you. From your User Content the Service makes tree designs and previews, prints, biographies, the page behind a print’s code or tag, and puzzles, games and calendars (“Generated Content”). Your User Content within it stays yours; as between you and us, the rest of it is ours. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to view, save, print and share Generated Content with your family and friends, and to post it anywhere for non-commercial purposes, such as on a family history site, on a memorial page or at a family reunion. A print you bought is yours to keep or give away. You may not sell Generated Content or copies of it, license it to others, or use it in a product or service of your own. This license continues after your account closes, for the copies you have saved or printed.

Third-party data. Place suggestions in the designer, and the place lookups behind the family map, include city and place data derived from GeoNames, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. We have adapted that data (filtered, reformatted, and combined with your own entries) for use in the Service.

10. Genealogy and accuracy

The Service is a design and visualization tool. We do not guarantee genealogical accuracy or completeness. You are responsible for reviewing and verifying User Content and outputs before placing an order.

Biographies are written from the entries on your tree, what your family adds to it (such as About tabs and obituaries), and the general history of the places and times your relatives lived in, partly with the help of AI services. They may state conclusions drawn from those records, and they can contain mistakes. They are a keepsake, not proof of genealogy. If you find a mistake, tell us at team@nearestdearest.com and we will look into it and correct it where we can.

11. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Nearest & Dearest will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits, data, or goodwill arising out of or related to your use of the Service.

Our total liability for any claim arising out of or related to the Service will not exceed the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

13. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Nearest & Dearest from claims, damages, losses, and expenses (including attorneys' fees) arising from your User Content, your misuse of the Service, or your violation of these Terms.

14. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or terminate access if we reasonably believe you violated these Terms or if necessary to protect the Service, our users, or our rights.

If we stop operating the Service. A print’s code or tag is a link to a page we host; it does not hold the page itself. We intend to keep that page, and the biographies on it, available for as long as we operate the Service. If we ever decide to shut the Service down, we will email account holders at least 90 days before, so there is time to save or print what you want to keep.

Your license to the Generated Content you have saved or printed, and sections 11, 12, 13 and 16, continue after your access ends.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If changes are material, we will take reasonable steps to notify you (for example, via an in-app notice). Continued use after changes means you accept the updated Terms.

16. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah, without regard to conflict of law principles. You agree that any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Utah, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts.

17. Contact

Questions about these Terms:
team@nearestdearest.com

Nearest & Dearest LLC
336 East University Pkwy #1209, Orem, UT 84058