Legal information
Site publisher: Michel Mysiorek, sole trader registered in France (entrepreneur individuel, EI), trading as KinScribe — 14 rue Auguste Rodin, 57330 Hettange-Grande, France.
Registration: French national business register (RNE), SIREN 130 947 039 — SIRET 130 947 039 00017.
VAT: VAT not applicable, Article 293 B of the French Tax Code (small business VAT exemption).
Publication director: Michel Mysiorek.
Contact: [email protected] — phone: +33 7 75 73 79 13.
Hosting provider: Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94107, United States — phone: +1 888 993 5273 — cloudflare.com.
Version in force from [TO BE COMPLETED: publication date].
KinScribe provides, on one hand, automated transcription and translation of old handwritten documents (article 2 below), and on the other hand genealogical research services carried out on request — locating a record, notarial documents and long deeds, tracing an ancestry back (with a heritage trip dossier available as an optional add-on) — described in article 3. For the first service, the user uploads an image of a document; the service returns a transcription, a modern French version, an English translation and a table of structured data. Processing is carried out by an artificial intelligence system.
Prices are shown on the home page in US dollars, all taxes included: $3.00 per document, $15.00 for a pack of 6 credits, $37.00 for a pack of 15 credits. Payment is made online through the payment provider Stripe. No banking details are collected or stored by KinScribe. Payment is due before the service is performed.
The services described on the home page under "Beyond transcription" (locating a record, notarial documents and long deeds, tracing an ancestry back), as well as the "Reviewed by KinScribe" option shown with the prices, are carried out by hand, after a request is submitted through the form. The heritage trip dossier ($99) is not a standalone service: it is offered only as an add-on to an ancestry already traced. These services follow rules distinct from automated transcription:
KinScribe works exclusively from registers already digitised and published online by public archive services — no visit to a reading room is included in the services described in article 3. Two limits follow from this, distinct from a record that was simply destroyed:
| Territory | Not online if more recent than | Civil registration since |
|---|---|---|
| France | 75 years, often ~100 years in practice depending on the departmental portal (art. L213-2 of the Code du patrimoine, CNIL recommendation) | 1792 (national civil registration) ; before that, depends on surviving parish registers |
| Luxembourg | ~100 years (threshold used by the National Archives for online publication) | 1795–1796 (French annexation) |
| Belgium / Wallonia | 100 years (births), 75 years (marriages and deaths since the royal decree of 11/2024) | 1796 (French annexation) |
| Germany — Rhineland-Palatinate | 130 years for the full register (110 years for a bare name index, no image) — a rule set by the Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz itself, stricter than the federal transfer-to-archives deadline (110 years) | 1798 (local Napoleonic civil registration) ; German civil registration (Standesamt) only became universal from 1874–1876 |
Saarland is not covered by the "Locating a record" service. Unlike Rhineland-Palatinate, no civil registers are published online there to date, whatever their age — reading-room access only, or a paid third-party service, both outside the scope of this service.
Thresholds checked against the texts in force as of September 2026, and by direct testing for Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland; they change over time (Belgium, for instance, raised its threshold for death records in November 2024) and are therefore reviewed periodically rather than treated as fixed.
Automated transcription is performed immediately after payment is confirmed, or immediately after a previously purchased credit is used. The result is displayed directly in the user's browser, where it can be corrected before being exported in the formats offered. Credits bought as a pack are valid for one year. Research services provided on request (article 3) follow the indicative turnaround shown for each on the home page, counted from confirmation of the request's scope.
Single documents and use of a credit. Under article L221-28 of the French Consumer Code, the right of withdrawal cannot be exercised for the supply of digital content not provided on a tangible medium where performance has begun with the consumer's prior express consent and express acknowledgment that the right of withdrawal is thereby lost. Before each transcription the user ticks a box requesting immediate performance and acknowledging the loss of that right upon delivery. This box is never ticked by default.
Unused credit packs. Buying a pack does not involve any immediate delivery. The user therefore has fourteen days from purchase to request a refund of the credits not yet used. Credits already used, corresponding to transcriptions delivered, remain payable on a pro rata basis.
Requests should be sent to [email protected].
Separately from the above, and as a commercial gesture, KinScribe undertakes to offer another attempt or a refund where a document proves technically unusable (unreadable image, technical failure of the service). This guarantee does not cover mere disagreement over a palaeographic reading.
The transcription is produced by an artificial intelligence system. It makes deciphering old handwriting considerably easier but does not guarantee a perfectly accurate reading. Uncertain passages are flagged as such. Every document supplied (PDF, image, text) states that it is generated by artificial intelligence, visibly and in its metadata. It is for the user to check decisive details — dates, names, parentage — against the original document before relying on them. KinScribe cannot be held liable for the consequences of using a transcription without that verification.
Data controller: the publisher of the site named in the legal notice above, who can be reached for any question about your data at [email protected].
Purposes and legal bases. Data is processed in order to: transcribe and display the uploaded document and, at your request, update it or email it to you (performance of the contract, Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR); collect the payment and keep its records (performance of the contract and accounting obligations, Art. 6(1)(b) and 6(1)(c)); answer a service request and draw up a quote (pre-contractual steps taken at your request, Art. 6(1)(b)); prevent abuse by limiting the number of requests per IP address, an address kept for at most two hours for that sole purpose (legitimate interest in protecting the service, Art. 6(1)(f)). No data is sold or used for advertising or profiling.
Required data. The image of the document is needed for the transcription; the email address entered at payment is requested by Stripe for the receipt; in the request form, the email address and the description of your needs are needed to reply to you, the name is optional. Without this data, the service cannot be provided.
Where payment is made per document, the uploaded image is kept for a maximum of two hours, the time needed to complete payment, and deleted as soon as the transcription is delivered. Where a credit is used, the image is not stored. The resulting text remains accessible for twenty-four hours so that the user can return to it.
For a credit pack, the service keeps, for its period of validity (one year), the code's balance and the reference of the corresponding Stripe payment, with no image or record text.
So that users can resume their review, the result and the uploaded image are kept in their own browser, on their device, for seven days at most: they are not sent back to KinScribe, and the "Clear all" button deletes them.
At the user's request, the documents of a transcription can be sent by email, only to the address entered at payment: no other address can be given. KinScribe keeps neither this address nor the documents sent, and receives no copy (only the email provider, Resend, keeps a technical delivery record); for seven days the service keeps only the payment reference and the number of emails left (three at most per document).
Service requests submitted through the dedicated form follow a different regime, because they involve an exchange: the request and any attached documents are kept for as long as handling it requires, and for no more than ninety days from submission, at which point they are deleted automatically. The user may ask for them to be deleted sooner, quoting the eight-character reference provided on submission.
Technical providers and transfers outside the European Union. The service relies on four providers, acting as processors, some of which process data in the United States. These transfers are safeguarded as follows:
— Cloudflare (website hosting, temporary storage of images, results and
requests): certification of Cloudflare, Inc. under the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and
the European Commission's standard contractual clauses;
— Anthropic (reading of the record by the Claude artificial intelligence):
the uploaded image and the text produced are automatically deleted from its servers within
thirty days (except content flagged by its safety checks, kept for up to two years) and are not
used to train its models; transfers are covered by the European
Commission's standard contractual clauses included in its data processing agreement;
— Stripe (payment, contract with Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd, Ireland):
certification of Stripe, LLC under the Data Privacy
Framework, supplemented by standard contractual clauses; card details never pass through
KinScribe;
— Resend (sending emails): certification under the Data Privacy Framework.
Storage on your device. The site uses no advertising cookies and no audience measurement. It keeps in your browser only what serves the service you asked for — your credit code, your documents and their images, for seven days at most; this data is neither read by KinScribe nor used to track you. Fonts are hosted on the site itself: viewing the pages sends no data to any third party.
Your rights. You have the right of access, rectification, erasure and restriction of processing, the right to portability of the data you provided, and the right to object to processing based on legitimate interest. They can be exercised at [email protected]. You may also lodge a complaint with the French data protection authority, the CNIL (cnil.fr).
Users remain the owners of the documents they upload and are free to use the transcriptions obtained, including for genealogical publication. It is for them to ensure that they hold the necessary rights over the documents uploaded, in particular under the rules on the re-use of public sector information applicable to archive holdings.
These terms are governed by French law. In the event of a dispute, consumers may use a consumer mediation service free of charge, after first sending a written complaint to [email protected]: the Centre de la Médiation de la Consommation de Conciliateurs de Justice (CM2C), 49 rue de Ponthieu, 75008 Paris, France, www.cm2c.net — online request: cm2c.net/declarer-un-litige.php. For a cross-border dispute within the European Union, the European Consumer Centre France may also be contacted (europe-consommateurs.eu).