Terms of Service

Last updated:

Before you rely on this: this is a plain-language draft, not a legal document reviewed by an attorney. Have it reviewed before relying on it for a real, publicly-launched service — particularly the billing, liability, and accuracy sections below.

What this service is

Travel Guide 411 aggregates public-domain historical newspapers, government records, and encyclopedia content, and — for Pro subscribers — uses AI to synthesize that material into narrative summaries with citations back to the original sources.

Accuracy is not guaranteed

We built citation discipline directly into the AI synthesis feature: every claim in a generated story is meant to trace back to a specific cited source, and the system is instructed not to invent facts beyond what its sources state. That said, this is genealogical and historical research support, not a certified or notarized record. Original scanned documents, OCR text, and third-party metadata (from the Library of Congress, DPLA, Wikipedia, and others) can themselves contain errors, and AI-generated narratives can still occasionally misread or misattribute a source despite these safeguards. Always verify anything important — a legal claim, a family history you plan to publish, a genealogical record for official use — against the original document.

Accounts

You're responsible for keeping your account credentials secure. You must be old enough to form a binding contract in your jurisdiction to create an account.

Subscriptions & billing

Pro subscriptions are billed on a recurring basis (monthly or annual, as selected) through Stripe. Subscriptions renew automatically until canceled. You can cancel at any time from your account; cancellation stops future billing but does not retroactively refund the current billing period unless required by law in your jurisdiction.

Acceptable use

Don't use automated scraping to bulk-extract the platform's aggregated/synthesized content beyond normal interactive use.
Don't attempt to circumvent free-tier usage limits (e.g. by rotating IP addresses or accounts specifically to evade rate limits).
Don't use the service to harass, defame, or misrepresent facts about identifiable living people.

Public-domain content

The underlying historical newspapers, government records, and similar primary-source content surfaced by this platform are, to the best of our sourcing, in the public domain or otherwise openly licensed at their origin. See our data sources & attribution page for specifics per source. Content from Wikipedia is used under its Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Limitation of liability

This service is provided "as is." To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for decisions made based on historical research, genealogical conclusions, or AI-synthesized narratives generated through this platform.

Changes

We may update these terms from time to time. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated terms.