Truestone

About sixteen hundred cases in the United States and Canada have been solved with forensic investigative genetic genealogy. There is no standard for how it should be done.

Not a loose standard or a disputed one. None. There is no ANSI standard, no Academy Standards Board accreditation, no OSAC subcommittee. The Department of Justice published an interim policy in November 2019, and it is still interim.

For a while that gap seemed manageable, because breaking a database's terms of service looked like a constitutional question. Then an Idaho trial court held that breaking those terms cannot, on its own, support a Fourth Amendment challenge, even where investigators searched a database they had no right to search. The problem didn't go away. It moved into discovery, into agency policy and into the credibility of whoever testifies. In all three, what helps is a record made at the time.

Truestone makes that record. It asks about eight gates, in order: eligibility, state law, the sample and its funding, which database was used and the date its terms were read, a search log, contacts with third parties and the reason for each, confirmatory testing, and notification and disclosure. It marks a gate as met only when the answer actually meets it, and a blank answer never counts. The result is one dated document listing what was checked, what was found, what fell short, and every source behind it. It saves to your own computer, opens again later, and prints.

It started as the working tool behind a conference talk. The presenter went looking for guidance and found there wasn't any. The practitioner's version is open and free. The versions above it are still being built, and the site says so instead of asking for a card number.