Tin Chest turns a box of certificates and photographs into a checked family record, where every name shows the document behind it.
Give it as a gift for £295, or do it yourself with our free guides.
You might have a box of certificates, a few photographs, and no idea where to start. This is where one family’s papers led. The names are changed. The records are real.
The 1851 census gives Martha’s age as 79, so in 1841 she was about 69. The 1841 census rounded adults’ ages down to the nearest five. Both pages agree: the same woman, in the same house.
The original page says landowner, not laundress. Margaret owned an estate in Buckinghamshire and was the local air-raid warden. One word in a typed copy had changed her life story.
An advert from the mid-1880s hinted that Samuel took on the inn then. But a job advert does not say who got the job. The lease ties Samuel to the inn, so the record uses its date.
We hoped one of the men was Arthur, a grandfather. A fuller copy names all ten men, and none is Arthur. The family record keeps the guess, marked as proved wrong.
Read the full story in One family on a map.
Have a box like this? Give it to a parent as a gift for £295, or start with the free guides.
Here is the first find from the box, as it sits in the family record. Every statement gets a card like this: what it says, when, where it was found, how we know, how sure you can be, and why. When later evidence proves a statement wrong, it stays on the record, marked as proved wrong.
From the family record A household in Wigan names changed
The guides are free, and so are Britain’s main free record sites. Later, a certificate might cost a little, but never without you choosing it. Read how much will it cost.
The Family Box gift costs £295, and you can buy it now. Two more paid options, a £99 self-serve kit and a £249 guided tier, are not for sale yet. The email form below tells you when they open.
Yes, for most questions most beginners start with. Britain’s free indexes cover hundreds of millions of birth, marriage, death, census and parish records. Read tracing your family for free.
The box of papers and an hour here and there. A phone is fine for reading the guides and searching the free record sites. Keeping your notes is easier on a laptop or desktop. Read what you need for the AI helper.
List the people you knew. Gather every certificate, photo and letter about them. By the end of the afternoon you will have a written list of what to look for next. Read how to get started.
Yes, as an optional note-keeper. The free note-keeping helper runs in an AI assistant and matches each statement to its document. Every statement must name a record, and anything not yet checked says so. How we use AI explains where your files go, and why AI invents ancestors shows what we guard against.
Your research files are kept on your own computer. Anything you choose to send to an AI assistant goes to that company under your account settings. Read what to leave out before you upload family details.
We send an occasional email when we publish a new guide, or when the paid Tin Chest kit is ready to buy. Nothing else.
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Tin Chest is built by Ed, who talked about it on the Giant Robots podcast.