Truestone

Roughly sixteen hundred cases in the United States and Canada have been resolved by forensic investigative genetic genealogy. There is no standard governing how it is done.

Not a loose standard, or a contested one. None: no ANSI standard, no Academy Standards Board accreditation, no OSAC subcommittee. The Department of Justice published an interim policy in November 2019, and it has been interim ever since.

For a while the gap looked survivable, because a violation of a database's terms felt like a constitutional problem, and constitutional problems have a shape everyone recognises. Then an Idaho trial court held that breaking those terms cannot on its own raise a Fourth Amendment challenge, even where investigators searched a database they were not entitled to search. The violation did not disappear. It moved. It lives now in discovery, in policy, and in the credibility of whoever is on the stand, and in all three of those places the only thing that helps is a record made at the time.

Truestone is that record. Eight gates, asked in order: eligibility, state law, sample and funding, which database and the date its terms were read, a search log, third party contacts and the basis for each, confirmatory testing, notification and disclosure. It reads the answers as they arrive and marks a gate satisfied only when it actually is, because unanswered never counts as satisfied. What comes out is one dated document: what was checked, what was found, what was not met, and every source the reference block leaned on. It saves to your own disk, reopens, and prints, and it is boring in exactly the way a defensible thing ought to be.

It began as the working tool behind a conference session, built because the presenter went looking for the guidance and found that none existed. The house considers that the best reason to build anything. The practitioner's tier is open and costs nothing; the tiers above it are still being made, and the page says so instead of quietly taking a card number.