Articles & Research Guides
We publish two kinds of writing: research guides, which document the methodology behind each Evidence Toolbox tool in depth, and articles on evidence-based research practice — written from real research experience, not summarized from other websites. Everything here is free to read, and new pieces are added as tools ship and as our own research surfaces topics worth writing about.
Research Guides For Our Products
- VariantChronicles Research Guide — Historic newspaper digitization produces predictable OCR errors that can make your ancestor invisible to a standard search. This guide explains the full range of variant types — character substitutions, Fraktur, diacritics, anglicization, and more — and walks through how to use VariantChronicles to search across them effectively within the Chronicling America collection. (Published May 2026)
- GenWebSearch Research Guide — Search the scattered county-based USGenWeb corpus using a single search. The database includes 665 million words and over 380,000 pages of extracted text. All search results take you to the specific USGenWeb page. (Published July 2026)
- FANlines Research Guide — Analyze decades of census records to identify your research subject’s FAN (Friends, Associates, and Neighbors) club. FANlines does that clerical work for you across every census page you supply, followed by a suite of analysis. A single run surfaces which neighbor families persist near your subject and migrate alongside them, how the household itself changed from one census to the next, and candidate maiden or married surnames for the women in the family (neighbors often married neighbors) — each ranked for further research. Every result is delivered as a self-contained HTML report, citations included, that you can save and print. (Published July 2026)
Articles
- Newspapers as Genealogical Sources — Newspapers have a fascinating seat at the genealogical table. From obituaries and legal notices to social columns and community correspondence, they hold far more than most researchers tap — and understanding their strengths, limitations, and the OCR reality of digital search is essential to using them well. (Published May 2026)
- Negative Searches: Why “Not Finding It” Still Matters — Why documenting what you did not find is just as important as recording what you did, and how negative searches strengthen proof arguments. (Published May 2026)