Larry Jones
Larry Jones is a co-founder of Double Helix Software LLC and the founder of DNA Family Trees.
A 1986 Computer Science graduate of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, Larry has spent decades working with technology, consulting for businesses and government organizations and designing innovative computer solutions. His interest in genealogy began with the deeply personal search for his biological father, leading him to become an experienced genetic genealogist and to develop cmSolver™, a tool created to help people use DNA matches to identify unknown family connections. He later founded the DNA Family Trees YouTube channel, where he has helped thousands of people better understand genetic genealogy, DNA matching, and the tools available to family-history researchers. Larry’s desire to bring those tools together with an integrated family tree became the original vision for Stemma™ and ultimately led to the formation of Double Helix Software.
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James Francis
James Francis is co-founder of Double Helix Software LLC and the founder of Calliope Concepts.
A 1984 Computer Science graduate of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, James brings more than 40 years of experience in software development, architecture, and technology leadership to Double Helix Software. He sharpened his development skills at Microsoft on the Office team where his work earned him 3 patents. He further learned about the importance of tracking, analyzing and storing changing demographic information while serving as Vice President of Research and Development on the Enterprise Master Patient Index product lines at QuadraMed. After stepping away from full-time corporate life, James returned to software development to help create Stemma, bringing decades of experience designing complex systems to the challenge of building powerful, intuitive tools for genealogy and family-history research.
Our Story
The story of Double Helix Software began long before the company itself.
Larry Jones and James Francis both studied Computer Science at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. After college, their careers took them in different directions as they spent decades working in software development and technology.
Years later, genealogy brought those paths back together.
Larry’s interest in genealogy began with a very personal search: finding his biological father.
DNA testing provided new possibilities, but understanding DNA matches—and determining how those matches connected to a family tree—could be extraordinarily difficult. Larry began developing tools to make that process easier.
One of those tools became cmSolver™, designed to help researchers use shared DNA matches to identify unknown or missing family connections.
At the same time, Larry began sharing what he had learned with the genealogy community through his DNA Family Trees YouTube channel. The channel grew to approximately 13,000 subscribers, providing tutorials and explanations about genetic genealogy, DNA research techniques, and the tools available to researchers.
But there was a larger problem.
Many genealogy tools solved individual pieces of the puzzle. Family trees lived in one place. DNA analysis happened somewhere else. Research tools were scattered across websites and applications. Moving between them often meant repeatedly entering, exporting, importing, or interpreting the same information.
Larry envisioned something more integrated: a comprehensive research environment built around the family tree itself.
He reached out to his former university classmate James Francis.
James had spent his career developing software and leading software development organizations and was semi-retired at the time. The idea was ambitious enough to change that.
Together, they began building what would become Stemma™.
Double Helix Software LLC was formed to develop and support that vision, bringing together Larry’s experience in genetic genealogy and genealogy education with James’s experience in software architecture, development, data management, and application design.
Stemma™ launched in June 2026.
Why We Built Stemma
Genealogy has changed dramatically.
Researchers today may work with family trees containing tens or hundreds of thousands of people, millions of relationships, historical records from around the world, and DNA matches connecting relatives across many generations.
Yet much of the software available to genealogists still treats these pieces of information separately.
We wanted to build something different.
Stemma was designed around the idea that the family tree should be the center of the research environment.
DNA analysis, family relationships, historical information, research issues, visualization, and specialized genealogy tools become much more powerful when they can work with the same underlying family tree.
Instead of creating another collection of disconnected utilities, we set out to create an integrated genealogy toolkit.