AutoTreeGen

Methodology

Status and confidence, not badges

A drawn line reads like a finding even when it is only a guess. AutoTreeGen refuses to hide that difference. Every relationship in your tree carries a status, a confidence and a citation — and the reasoning that produced them is open to inspection.

Evidence first

That is why the product does not draw a confident line and call it done. It tells you how confident it is, why, and what would change its mind. A hypothesis is a first-class object, recorded with its rationale — not a quiet draft that hardens into fact by neglect.

Five ways to label a claim

A claim is never just true or false. It sits in one of five states — and the colour tells the truth, too: conflict is the only red, and a rejected claim is a calm, neutral grey, not a failure.

Confirmed
Independent sources and DNA converge with no open conflict.
Probable
The weight of evidence leans one way, with a point still to settle.
Hypothesis
A first-class lead, recorded with its rationale — not yet proven.
Conflict
Two sources disagree; the engine holds it open instead of guessing.
Rejected
Tested against the evidence and dropped — a quiet, neutral outcome.

The proof standard, made operational

Serious genealogy already has a standard for what counts as proof. AutoTreeGen turns its five elements from a checklist you remember into a discipline the engine enforces on every claim.

  1. 01

    A reasonably exhaustive search

    A conclusion is only as good as the records behind it. The engine tracks what has been searched and what is still missing, so a thin search never reads as a strong result.

  2. 02

    Complete, accurate citations

    Every fact links to its source — archive, fond, register entry, DNA kit. A claim with no citation is not a fact; it is a lead.

  3. 03

    Analysis and correlation

    Records, place names, dates and DNA are correlated against one another. Agreement raises confidence; a lone source stays modest.

  4. 04

    Resolution of conflicts

    When two sources disagree, the engine holds the conflict open and shows both — it does not pick the convenient one and move on.

  5. 05

    A soundly reasoned conclusion

    The final status is written down with its rationale, its confidence, and the next step that would strengthen or break it.

Anti-fantasy: the five tree-jinn

Errors creep into trees in recognisable shapes. We name five of them — each a recurring family of mistakes with a dedicated detector — so a finding is never just “the checker said no”, but a classified, explainable diagnosis.

  • TreeGin

    Bottle

    A fabricated fact sealed inside a single record — a date, a place or a name that no source supports.

  • TreeJen

    Bottle

    Two different people forced into one — same-name conflation that quietly merges two lives into a single, impossible person.

  • TreeZoo

    Cave

    Bulk over-inclusion — a branch stuffed with loosely-gathered relatives that were never actually attested.

  • TreeJeans

    Branch

    Someone else's identity pasted onto a branch — the ThruLines-style collapse that turns a side cousin into a fake direct ancestor.

  • TreeWeed

    Soil

    Orphan, unsourced records growing untended — flagged, never deleted, so nothing is lost while the soil is weeded.

See the method on a real-shaped case

Walk through worked examples, including a popular hint the engine rejects.

Worked examples