A 12toKNOW Methodology
Ten field guides for doing family history the disciplined way — the conventions, scales, and workflows worked out over a real multi-year project, each generalized so you can adopt it on your own.
This is rigor-first genealogy for the AI-assisted era. Every claim carries an explicit confidence tier; every finding traces to a source a stranger could check; and the discipline that produces distribution-quality work is treated as a deliverable in its own right — versioned, audited, and reusable — rather than left as tacit craft. The machine can reach further and faster than any researcher working alone. What it cannot do is decide whether a claim is true. These guides are built to keep that line bright.
New here? Start with the Kits. The two free Complete Kits — Researching & Writing a Family History with Claude are the on-ramp: the condensed guide, the templates, and a worked sample. The ten field guides below are the full methodology underneath them — go deeper when you're ready.
Foundations — building a record that holds
Specialized methods — extending the record
Working with the AI
What it's for. A disciplined version-numbering and release ("cut") convention for a long-running research project, so the record stays legible to you, to collaborators, and to future working sessions.
When to use it. Any multi-month project where findings accumulate in reviewable batches and you need to know why a given release was issued when it was.
Framework change → Major. Substantive evidence with gates closed → Minor. A mid-cycle breakthrough touching several pedigree entries, with gates unfired and weeks still to run → Patch, filed as a "mid-cycle close." Accumulated work needing a checkpoint → Patch, as a "bridge cut." A typo → just edit in place.
A May 2026 mid-cycle close (v2.7.1) documented eight generations of pre-immigration ancestry out of the 1572 and 1634 Visitations of Hertfordshire — adding twenty direct-line ancestors up to Generation 20 — without triggering a Minor cut, because that cycle's DNA gate hadn't yet fired. Big finding, correctly filed as a checkpoint rather than a release.
"Additive within an unchanged framework is a Minor bump, not a Major one."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. A scale that assigns every claim an explicit confidence tier, so a reader knows exactly which claims to trust and how far.
When to use it. On any research record meant to withstand outside scrutiny — and, more broadly, on any analytical work whose claims rest on uneven evidence.
Promotion runs SPECULATIVE → PROBABLE → DOCUMENTED, with EXPECTED feeding in; any tier can drop to FALSIFIED.
A long-carried Cherokee-ancestry line was moved to FALSIFIED once DNA and primary-source evidence contradicted it. The pedigree slot was preserved rather than deleted, keeping the falsifying evidence permanently on the record — so the same dead end can't be re-walked by a future researcher.
"Conflicts get recorded, not resolved by fiat. Falsified claims are documented, not deleted."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. A rigid pedigree-indexing convention (Sosa-Stradonitz numbering) that gives every direct ancestor a permanent number you can derive by arithmetic.
When to use it. Any pedigree project that needs a stable index that never collides as the tree grows.
The subject is #1. The father of any person #X is #2X; the mother is #2X+1. From that: even numbers are men, odd numbers are women, and the number's range tells you the generation. Four "quadrants" (descent through each grandparent, #4–#7) place any ancestor on the correct family line at a glance.
Read "#4581" cold: it falls in the 4096–8191 band, so Generation 13 (a ten-times-great-grandmother); it's odd, so a wife (her husband is #4580); her parents are #9162 and #9163 in Generation 14 — and the chain resolves into the paternal quadrant. Five facts, from the number alone. When twenty new ancestors were later added out to Generation 20, not one existing number had to move.
"New ancestors get new numbers; no existing number is ever reassigned."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. The citation conventions that let any claim be verified, audited, and defended by an outside reviewer — the layer that turns a casual family tree into a research record.
When to use it. Every time a source supports a claim.
Every external citation carries six parts: a citation handle, the specific record locator, the repository / access path, the local archive filename, the date retrieved, and a cross-reference to the claim(s) it supports. Your project's own prior output gets a parallel internal-corpus citation that records inheritance position and scope-of-supersession instead of bibliographic locators.
A single batch of 41 PDFs was triaged in four days: an anchor pass separated three high-leverage documents from the other thirty-eight, eight clusters were identified, and six were integrated by the next cut — yielding about twenty new facts and four PROBABLE → DOCUMENTED promotions. The canonical citation walk-through is a Revolutionary War pension file (NARA M804, Roll 2144, File R.9342), whose third page is a family register sworn by the widow in 1845.
"A missing element is data. A reader can act on 'date TBD.' They cannot act on a blank field."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. Naming and folder conventions that keep a large archive — hundreds of files, images, memos, and versioned deliverables — navigable across researchers, sessions, and years.
When to use it. Any project accumulating many files over a long time.
v2_7, never v2.7, to avoid operating-system escaping trouble.Tier 1 (Blue) — the casual family reader: overview and story. Tier 2 (Green) — the engaged genealogist: reference and structure. Tier 3 (Red) — the audit-trail reader: full sourcing for a peer reviewer. Same content, three depths, each with its own prefix and renumbering protocol.
A scanned pension-image series carried the OCR misspelling "Searey" for Searcy. Because those filenames were already cited across the master report, they were deliberately left as-is — renaming a file would silently break every citation that pointed to it. The distribution binder grew to roughly 530 pages across the three reader tiers.
"Stability of citation beats post-hoc tidiness. At first citation, freeze the name."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. A repeatable pipeline that turns a raw DNA test into integrated, documented genealogical evidence across platforms and inheritance streams.
When to use it. Whenever a new result or match cluster enters the project and needs consistent handling.
1) A cluster identifies a search space, not an ancestor. 2) Hold candidates at PROBABLE until a primary source closes them. 3) Cross-check inheritance streams before committing.
A 15-match autosomal cluster — surname density converging on Lunenburg, Mecklenburg, and Halifax County, Virginia in the mid-1700s — placed a common ancestor around Generation 8–10. An mtDNA cross-check across four branches ruled out the maternal line; targeted documentary research then identified the DeGraffenreid family, and two of its members were promoted to DOCUMENTED only after a land-warrant adjacency confirmed them. A later deep-paternal test independently corroborated the paternal surname. DNA pointed; the paper closed it.
"A cluster identifies a search space, not an ancestor."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. A systematic census-neighbor method (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) that identifies, locates, and corroborates families through the households documented around them, tracked across decades.
When to use it. When a name index fails, a surname is mangled or illegible, or a suspected kinship or migration needs corroboration the vital records leave open.
1) Proximity corroborates but doesn't prove. 2) When the index fails, the neighbors are the index. 3) Neighbor-set continuity carries an identity a mangled surname can't. All of it lives in a Neighbor Cluster Ledger keyed on both dwelling number and surname-by-year.
One neighbor — Silas Cheek, born in North Carolina — appears beside the same family's household in five consecutive censuses from 1840 to 1880: in 1840 next to the wife's father, in 1880 next to the wife herself. Forty years of unbroken adjacency proved the neighborhood was structural, not coincidental. A household illegible by name in the 1860 census was then confirmed by its composition plus the identical neighbor web that had bracketed the family in 1850 and 1870.
"When the index fails, the neighbors are the index."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. Converting documented ancestry into successful lineage-society applications, and managing a portfolio of Patriot pathways.
When to use it. When a descendant wants formal recognition and the research already supports one or more qualifying lines.
Six questions in the 0–72 hours before filing: are the corroborating-source insertions actually in place? are the record-copy files present? do current-cycle findings change anything? are the modern-end vital records sufficient? is all placeholder text resolved? and what is the short, actionable checklist for the final stretch? The descent chain is the application.
A single day's roughly $90 record-copy order — nine copies across six Patriots — doubled the portfolio from two pathways to four, promoting two Patriots to fully DOCUMENTED on the strength of a 1781 county will image and a Revolutionary War pay voucher found in the supporting-document packets. The pre-filing audit then caught that none of four planned source insertions were actually in place and six record-copy files were missing — both fixed in the same session, before anything was filed.
"Don't file before the master supports it. The descent chain is the application."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. The operating discipline for turning verified genealogy into a narrative "a stranger will feel and a genealogist will trust" — rigorous documentary scaffolding carrying warm, interior prose.
When to use it. When you write the family up at chapter and volume scale.
The one rule: plant just enough, and stop — the deliverable is the feeling, not the plant. Then verify in layers: the reader tests, a lexical and numerical audit, an author slow-read, image-verification at zoom, and a retrofit sources audit that tier-grades every finished sentence.
In one volume, a single mis-transcribed death certificate had propagated a false through-line for a whole chapter — until the image was read at full zoom. The undertaker field actually said "no undertaker / homemade coffin" (an earlier pass had invented a "Conrad Coffin"); the medical field said "No Doctor" (an earlier pass had invented a recurring physician); and the burial place was "Pine Grove," not the name that had been carried. Reading the image corrected all three, and the corrections cascaded back through the chapter.
"A chapter that passes every audit and does not move the reader has failed."
↑ Back to the ten guidesWhat it's for. The discipline for working with the AI tool itself — managing a project's knowledge-capacity ceiling and structuring work across multiple AI workspaces.
When to use it. When a project nears a capacity limit, when scope outgrows a single workspace, or at any session or project transition.
Treat the continuity prompt as a first-class deliverable: saved as a file, named for what's ahead, carrying six elements — a continuation statement, the current canonical state, the active gating conditions, pending dependencies, the scope (including what's explicitly out of scope), and an "orient yourself first" instruction. Written fresh (recency matters), it lets a brand-new session pick up exactly where the last one stopped.
A roughly 3,200-word bootstrap prompt, drafted the same day and checked against the actual current workbook and master, let a fresh session produce four coordinated deliverables in a single sitting with no state-mismatch errors. Separately, an outside researcher's contributed secondary sources were absorbed only after they were triangulated against the primary Visitation records — never on trust alone.
"The continuity prompt is what re-establishes context — it is not optional."
↑ Back to the ten guidesFive of these are foundations you build once and lean on forever — versioning, evidence grading, pedigree numbering, source standards, and file organization. Four are specialized methods you reach for when the work demands them — DNA, neighbor-cluster reconstruction, lineage-society applications, and long-form narrative. One is the discipline for working alongside the AI itself. Run together, they're a single machine: grade the evidence, document the source, cluster the leads, confirm at the primary record, and never let a coherent-sounding inference stand in for an actual page.
Want the condensed, ready-to-use version? Start with the two Complete Kits. Want to see what the method produced? Visit The Searcy Family History.