Privacy

This page explains what Girmit collects, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to satisfy the Protection of Personal Information Act, and to be readable.

The free research tool collects nothing

Everything you type into the research tool — names, dates, documents you describe, the whole family tree — is saved in your own web browser on your own device. It is never uploaded to this site. We cannot see it, we cannot recover it for you, and we could not hand it to anyone else if we were asked.

Two consequences are worth knowing. Clearing your browser data erases your tree, so use Data → Export to file to keep your own copy. And because the store belongs to the browser and the address, a tree built on one device or at a different web address will not appear on another.

When you send an enquiry

The enquiry form asks for your name, your email address, and a description of what you already have. We keep those three things so that we can reply to you, and we keep them on this site as well as emailing them to ourselves, so that an enquiry is not lost if the email fails.

We do not sell this information, share it for marketing, or use it to contact you about anything other than the enquiry you sent. If you ask us in the same email, we delete it once the conversation is finished.

Documents you send us for paid research

Certificates and family papers sent to us for a piece of research are used only for that research, kept while the work is live, and returned or deleted on request. Family documents routinely carry other living people’s details, so we treat the whole file as confidential rather than picking it apart.

What this site does not do

There is no advertising network on this site, no social media tracking, and no third-party profiling. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which means Google’s servers see the request for the font file.

Your rights

You may ask what we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to hello@girmit.co.za and we will answer within a reasonable time. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.