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5 min read

How to get started.

Numbered steps for a first afternoon of research, from turning off training to seeding the archive with the people you already know.

This is a plan for one afternoon, not a weekend project. Follow the steps in order. Stop when you reach the end, even if you want to keep going. A short, checked result beats a long, shaky one.

Step 1. Turn off training.

Before you type a single family name into Claude, open Settings, then Privacy, and turn off “Help Improve our AI models”. Two reasons. Ancestry’s terms of service now forbid using its content to train an AI system. Anthropic’s consumer plans also use new conversations to improve Claude, unless you turn that setting off. Our privacy guide walks through the exact menu path.

Step 2. List who you already know.

Write down the people you knew personally, or a living relative can still describe first-hand: parents, grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. Favour people who are no longer living. A settled life can be researched fully straight away, where a living relative’s details need the extra care our privacy guide sets out.

Step 3. Dig out every document you can find.

Gather everything connected to those people. Certificates, photographs with names on the back, letters, newspaper clippings, orders of service, service records, address books: all of it counts. Nothing is too small to capture. A random newspaper clipping that mentions someone can show where they were living or what their job was, sometimes years before any official record catches up with it.

Treat every scrap as a candidate document for now. Working out what actually matters is a later step, done inside the archive, not a reason to leave something out of this one.

Step 4. Download the free skill.

Download the free Tin Chest skill from this site. It arrives as a ZIP file. Save it somewhere you can find again, such as your Downloads folder, rather than opening it straight from a browser prompt.

Step 5. Unzip it.

On a Mac, Safari sometimes unzips a download automatically. If you see a folder instead of a ZIP, look beside it for the original file, or check your Downloads folder. On Windows, double-clicking a ZIP opens it as a browsable folder. Do not stop there. Extract the whole folder properly first, using “Extract All” in File Explorer.

Step 6. Add it to Claude.

In Claude, open Settings, then Capabilities, and check that “Code execution and file creation” is turned on. Open Customize, then Skills, and upload the extracted folder. Our equipment guide explains the warning message you will see and why it is safe to proceed here.

Step 7. Seed the archive.

Give Claude the people from Step 2 and the documents from Step 3. Ask it to record each document as a source, and each fact inside a document as a claim tied to that source. Where a memory has no document behind it, ask Claude to record it anyway, labelled “no source yet”, rather than leaving it out because it cannot be proven today.

Step 8. Read the labels on the answer.

The skill labels each claim VERIFIED, INFERRED or UNCONFIRMED. VERIFIED means a cited source was checked and supports that exact statement. INFERRED means a reasoned conclusion, with its reasoning shown. UNCONFIRMED means a memory or a guess that still needs checking. Read every label. A confident sentence with no label is a mistake to fix, not a result to trust. Why AI invents ancestors explains why this distinction matters.

What done looks like.

By the end of the afternoon, aim for this: the people you knew are in the archive, every document you could find is attached to them, and you have a written list of the gaps that remain. That is a real result. It does not answer every question about anyone in it, and it should not try to.

Your next session picks one of those people and pushes back one generation: a parent, a grandparent, whoever the gap list points to next.

Keep that gap list somewhere you will find it again next week. It is the starting point for your second session. It is also the beginning of the archive our backup guide will show you how to protect.

Sources.