Tin Chest
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Guide 1 of 11 · 5 min read

How to get started.

Numbered steps for a first afternoon of research, from the people you remember to a written list of what to look for next.

This takes one afternoon. 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.

You need a notebook, or a folder on your computer, and whatever family papers you can find. Nothing here costs money.

Step 1. 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 backup guide sets out.

Step 2. 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, not a reason to leave something out of this one.

Keep it all together in one folder, paper or digital, for these people. A pattern across ten documents is far easier to see than a guess made from one.

Step 3. Write down each fact and where it came from

Take one person at a time. For each document, write a line for every fact it gives: a name, a date, a place, a job. Each line is one small statement about one person, with the document it came from. Name the document beside it, so you can find it again.

Where a memory has no document behind it, write it down anyway. Record the memory as its own source. Note whether the teller saw it themselves or was told it by someone else. Do not leave it out because it cannot be proven today.

Step 4. Give every statement two marks

How we know says where the statement came from: an official record, something written at the time, a newspaper, a later copy or index, someone who saw it, something told second-hand, or something you worked out. How sure says low, medium or high. Write both marks beside each statement. A confident sentence with no source named is a mistake to fix before you trust anything built on it. Why AI invents ancestors explains why this distinction matters.

Step 5. Add the free helper, if you want one

This step is optional. Everything above works with a notebook alone. Tin Chest also offers a free helper for Claude, an AI assistant. It keeps the same notes for you: each document becomes a source, and each statement inside it gets its two marks. You still check every statement against its document.

Before you use the AI helper

Before you type a single family name into Claude, open Settings, then Privacy, and turn off “Help Improve our AI models”. Anthropic uses new conversations to improve Claude unless you turn this off, and Ancestry’s terms forbid using its content to train an AI system. Our privacy guide shows the exact menu path, and how we use AI explains where your files go.

  1. Download the free Tin Chest skill from the download section. No email address is needed. It arrives as a ZIP file. Save it somewhere you can find again, such as your Downloads folder.
  2. Leave it zipped. Claude needs the ZIP file, not what is inside it. On a Mac, Safari sometimes opens a download for you and leaves a folder. If you see a folder instead of a ZIP, look for the original ZIP in Downloads or the Bin. If it has gone, turn off “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading” in Safari’s settings, under General, and download the skill again. On Windows, double-clicking a ZIP shows what is inside, like a folder. You do not need to open it at all.
  3. In Claude, open Settings, then Capabilities, and check that “Code execution and file creation” is turned on. What you need for the AI helper explains the short caution Claude shows.
  4. Open Customize, then Skills. Select the + button, then “Create skill”, then “Upload a skill”. Choose the ZIP and upload the ZIP file itself, not a folder or a file from inside it. Then check that the skill is switched on. Anthropic’s skills guide gives these steps. Checked 18/10/2026.
  5. Give Claude the people from Step 1 and the documents from Step 2. Ask it to note each document as a source, and each statement with its two marks. Check each one against its document before you keep it.

What done looks like

By the end of the afternoon, aim for this: the people you knew are written down, every document you could find is noted beside 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 folder now gives you a name, a rough date and a place for each person. Those three things are what Britain’s free record sites need for a search, and tracing your family for free shows where to start.

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

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