Search Smarter. Document Clearly. Analyze with Confidence.
Evidence Toolbox brings together practical tools that help genealogists search more effectively, document findings in real time, and analyze evidence with confidence. Each tool is designed around real genealogical research workflows — forming questions, running targeted searches, documenting what you did, and evaluating what you found.
Tools for Every Stage of Research
Careful genealogy moves through the same arc every time: search the sources where an answer should appear, analyze what the accumulated evidence supports, and document your work into something you can cite and defend. Documentation runs through every step, but it’s also where research lands — so Evidence Toolbox has purpose-built tools for each stage, and every one of them runs free, in your browser, with no account.
Search
Expand what public databases can do, and revive digital collections that have become difficult or impractical to search.
- VariantChronicles — Newspaper search across Chronicling America that automatically covers the spelling and OCR variants a single query would miss.
- GenWebSearch — Full-text search across nearly 2,700 USGenWeb county sites: over 388,000 pages and 650 million words of volunteer transcriptions that general search engines index poorly, with per-county coverage ratings that tell you what a “no results” really means.
Analyze
Bring analytics and visualization to traditional methods — especially FAN club analysis across records.
- FANlines — Follow a family’s Friends, Associates, and Neighbors across decades of census records to surface migration, persistence, and candidate marriage-origin leads, delivered as a self-contained report you can save and print.
Document
Capture findings as you work and produce clear, consistent records you can reuse across your research.
- AbsenceOfRecord — Turn a search that found nothing into a clean, citable negative-search statement for your research log and proof arguments.
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Research Guides & Articles
Alongside the tools, we publish practical methodology articles written from real research experience — including a complete guide to OCR surname variants in Chronicling America, a guide to searching the scattered USGenWeb county-site corpus, a guide to cross-decade FAN analysis with census records, a deep look at newspapers as genealogical sources, and an argument for why documenting the searches that find nothing is some of the most valuable documentation you will ever write.
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How Researchers Use Evidence Toolbox
Evidence Toolbox tools are designed to integrate into the research cycle that careful genealogists already follow: form a focused research question, identify the sources where the answer should appear, search those sources thoroughly, document every search — successful or not — and analyze what the accumulated evidence supports.
A typical session using two example tools may look like this. You are tracing a German immigrant family in 1880s Missouri. You open VariantChronicles and search the surname across Chronicling America, letting the tool cover the Fraktur and OCR variants that a standard search would miss. Two variants surface a marriage notice and a probate notice you had never seen. The county paper for the years you most needed, however, turns up nothing — so you open AbsenceOfRecord, describe the search you just ran in plain language, and paste the generated negative search statement into your research log. Ten minutes of documentation now saves you from unknowingly repeating the same search next year, and gives your eventual proof argument the negative evidence it needs.
Every tool follows the same principles: no accounts, no stored data, structured outputs you can reuse, and honest results — if a search fails or a source has gaps, the tool says so rather than returning an incomplete answer.
Tools in Development
We build tools we want to use ourselves, and more are always in progress. Coming soon:
- TickSolver — Extract every birth-date and household fact that pre-1850 census tick marks will support, checking all possible arrangements exactly rather than the few a hand worksheet can.
- ConflictLedger — A workbench for resolving conflicting evidence under the Genealogical Proof Standard: sort which sources truly conflict from those that merely differ, and draft the resolution discussion your proof argument needs.
- ChronoBounds — Turn the loose date clues in your records — “aged 40,” “of full age,” “died before” — into exact, defensible date ranges through calendar-precise interval logic.
- SamePerson — Weigh whether two records describe the same individual, laying out the agreements and contradictions in evidence rather than returning a black-box verdict.
- BookTrace — Search the full text of digitized genealogy and local-history books for the names and places in your research.
Stay Updated
New tools ship regularly. Subscribe for occasional updates on new genealogy research tools — no more than once or twice a month.
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About Evidence Toolbox
Evidence Toolbox is created by Glenside Digital LLC, an independent studio in Pennsylvania led by Nathan, an avocational genealogist whose research practice is grounded in the Genealogical Proof Standard, with primary-source work at major repositories including the Library of Congress. Every tool on this site began as a solution to a problem in his own research and is field-tested on real family lines before release. Read more about the project. If it’s useful to you, a small Ko-Fi contribution helps keep it going.
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