Root & Quill App Privacy Policy

Effective date: 7 October 2026

This policy covers the Root & Quill app for iPhone. It doesn’t cover the Root & Quill website, which has its own privacy policy.

The short version

The Root & Quill app doesn’t collect any personal information. There’s no account and no sign-in, no ads, no analytics and no tracking. What you do in the app stays on your device.

Who we are

The app is published by Root & Quill LLC of Granby, Connecticut, which researches and writes custom family histories. In this policy, “we” and “us” mean Root & Quill LLC.

To reach us, email dave@rootandquillfamily.com or use the Contact page.

What the app doesn’t collect

• The app doesn’t ask for your name, email address, phone number or any other contact details.
• The app doesn’t ask for your location. The places on the living map are places in the family’s history, and they’re built into the app.
• The app doesn’t ask for access to your contacts, photos, camera or microphone.
• The app has no analytics, crash-reporting or advertising tools in it, and it doesn’t use your device’s advertising identifier.
• We don’t track you across other apps or websites, and we don’t sell or share information about you.
• There’s nothing to buy in the app, so we never see any payment information.

What stays on your device

To keep your place and your preferences, the app saves a few things in its own storage on your device:

• your reading progress, badges, game and quiz scores, and streak
• your bookmarks, favorite recipes and shopping list
• your settings, such as appearance, text size and read-aloud voice
• the notes you write in the notes journal

None of this is sent to us or to anyone else, and we can’t see it. Like other app data, it may be included in your device’s own backups, such as iCloud Backup, which Apple handles under its own terms.

If you use Export backup in the Sample Edition’s Settings, the app makes a file of your progress, settings and notes and opens the share sheet, so you choose where to save or send it. Saving your notes as a text file, or a page as a PDF, works the same way. We only see these files if you send them to us yourself.

How to delete it

• In the Sample Edition’s Settings, Reset progress clears your progress, badges, scores and streak, and you can choose whether to clear your notes too. Bookmarks, favorite recipes and the shopping list stay.
• Deleting the app from your device removes everything the app has stored on it.

Read-aloud

Read-aloud uses the voices built into your iPhone. The text is turned into speech on your device; the app doesn’t send it to us or to any outside speech service.

Maps

When your device is online, the maps in the Sample Edition (the living map, and the smaller maps elsewhere in the edition) load modern map images (“tiles”) from Esri’s ArcGIS service, the way any map does. To send those images, Esri’s servers receive the standard information that comes with any internet request, such as your device’s IP address, and which part of the map is on screen (places in the family’s story, not your location). The app doesn’t send Esri anything about you, and we receive nothing from these requests. Esri explains how it handles that information in its privacy statement.

When you’re offline, the maps show a plain background and historic maps built into the app, and request nothing.

Everything else the app shows, including the chapters, pictures, records and film, is built into the app.

Links to websites

“Book a free consultation” and the other website links open www.rootandquillfamily.com in a Safari window inside the app. That window is Safari, kept separate from the app: the app can’t see what you look at or type there. The website is hosted by Squarespace and has its own privacy practices, including a banner where you can accept or decline cookies. See the website’s privacy policy and Squarespace’s privacy policy.

In the Sample Edition, the links in source citations and image credits open the record’s or picture’s page on FamilySearch, Portale Antenati, the Danish National Archives or Wikimedia Commons, in the same kind of Safari window. Those sites have their own privacy policies, and the app can’t see what you do there either.

If you send us a message or ask for a consultation through the website, we use what you send to reply to you and to plan your family history with you.

Children

The app is meant for readers aged 13 and over. It isn’t directed to children under 13, and it doesn’t collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If we change how the app handles information, we’ll update this page and the effective date at the top.

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