26 septembre 2026
How MyTools Helps You as a Family Historian
Fifteen side tasks around family history research, from parish registers to faded interview tapes, each solved by a free tool that runs in your browser.
Family history is mostly detective work. Following a surname through three spellings and two border changes, noticing that the baptism date on the census cannot be right because the mother was already a widow, finding the one cousin in Ohio who still has the family Bible. That is the part that keeps you up past midnight, and it is the reason you started.
The rest of it is files. A 60-page scan of a parish register where your people appear on page 38. Shoeboxes of prints that come off the flatbed crooked and bordered in white. A cassette of your great-aunt talking about the farm, digitised so quietly you can barely hear her. A camcorder transfer from 1994 that nobody's laptop will play. Every archive, every relative and every society newsletter wants its files in a slightly different shape.
Below are fifteen of those side tasks, with the free in-browser tool that handles each one. These are online tools for family historians in the plainest sense: no installation, no account, and your family's photos and documents never leave your computer.
Page 38 of a 60-Page Parish Register
The diocesan archive sent the whole register for 1841 to 1856 as one PDF. Your great-great-grandfather's baptism is on page 38, his sister's on page 41, and the remaining 58 pages belong to other people's families.
Extract PDF Pages lets you click the two thumbnails you need, or type 38, 41, and download a new two-page file. The original stays untouched in your archive folder, and the version you attach to the tree is small enough that relatives will actually open it.
One File per Ancestor
Johann Weber exists in your records as five separate PDFs: a baptism entry, two census pages, a ship manifest and a death notice clipped from a regional newspaper. They live in three folders named after the websites you downloaded them from.
Merge PDF combines them into one document, and you drag the files into chronological order before you download. Birth first, death last, one file named after the man himself. When a cousin asks what you have on Johann, you send a single attachment instead of an apologetic list.
The Research Binder the Society Inbox Rejected
You are sharing your findings on the Weber line with the county genealogy society. The merged binder is 42 MB, mostly because the archive scanned every page at a resolution meant for microfilm. The society's volunteer inbox bounces anything over 10 MB.
Compress PDF shrinks it right in the browser tab, and you choose how aggressive the compression should be. Old handwriting survives a moderate setting well, so start there and check a page or two before you send it.
Grandmother's Letters, Photographed at the Kitchen Table
Your aunt found eleven letters your grandmother wrote home in 1952. She photographed each page on her phone and sent you the lot on WhatsApp. They arrived as eleven JPGs with names like IMG_4471, in no particular order.
JPG to PDF turns them into one document. Put the pages in the order the letters were written, download, and you have something you can print, file and share as one piece. It reads like correspondence again instead of a camera roll.
White Scanner Borders Around Every Print
Small prints from the 1940s are three inches wide. The scanner bed is A4. Every scan comes back as a little photo floating in a sea of white, sometimes with the edge of the neighbouring print creeping in from the side.
Crop Image lets you drag the frame tight around the photo and download only the picture. Do it once for each print before it goes into the tree, and the thumbnails on your genealogy site finally show faces instead of margins.
Sixty Scans, a Dozen Sideways
You scanned the whole album in one evening, laying prints on the glass whichever way they fit. A dozen came out on their side. Your laptop shows some of them upright and your genealogy site shows them sideways, because the orientation lives in a tag that not every program reads.
Rotate Image fixes the pixels themselves, not just the tag, so the photo stays upright in every viewer, every upload and every printout. Turn it, download it, and it is done for good.
A Wallet-Sized Portrait for the Reunion Banner
The only photo of your great-grandmother as a young woman is a two-inch print that someone carried in a wallet for decades. The reunion committee wants her face on a poster by the entrance, and the scan looks blocky as soon as you stretch it past a postcard.
Upscale Image enlarges it two or four times with an AI model that runs inside your browser. Instead of stretched pixels you get a sharper, larger file the print shop can work with, and the only copy of her face never passes through anyone else's server.
Which One Is Great-Uncle Karl?
A school class photo from 1928. Thirty-four boys in four rows, all in the same jacket. You know which one is Karl because his sister wrote his name on the back, with an arrow that has since faded to nothing.
Draw Red Circles puts that arrow back. Circle the boy in the third row, add a short label with his name and the year, and download. The next person who inherits the photo will not have to guess.
Living Cousins in a Public Tree
Your public tree shows a 1985 christening photo. Your ancestor is in the middle. Around her stand four relatives who are still alive, and at least one of them has asked not to appear online.
Blur Image lets you drag a rectangle over each face you need to hide and leave the one the photo is for untouched. The record stays useful, and the family group chat stays calm.
Great-Aunt Rosa, Barely Audible
The interview happened in 1998, on a cassette recorder set down on a tablecloth. Rosa talks for forty minutes about the farm, the flood and the brother who emigrated. Digitised, she is so quiet that you have to hold the laptop speaker to your ear.
Boost Audio Volume raises the whole recording by a few decibels with a limiter that stops the loud moments from crackling. Her voice comes up to a normal listening level and the story finally plays through the car speakers on the way to the next archive.
Transcribing a Fast Talker
"Then Papa went down to the harbour, and that was the last we saw of the horse." Rosa tells it at a gallop, in a dialect you half understand, and you type slower than she talks.
Change Audio Speed slows the file to 0.75× or even 0.5× while keeping her pitch where it was. She still sounds like herself, just more patient, and you can get the names and places down on the first pass instead of the fifth.
The Voice Memo From Cousin Ana
Ana recorded her father telling the story of how the family left the old village. She sent it from her iPhone as an M4A. The oral-history section of your genealogy site only accepts MP3, and your uncle's old media player refuses the file altogether.
Audio to MP3 converts it in a single step. Upload, convert, download, and the recording plays anywhere you need it to.
A Camcorder Tape Nobody Can Play
Your uncle paid a shop to transfer the family's Hi8 tapes. The files came back as AVI, and half the family sees an error message when they double-click. The other half see sound without picture.
Video to MP4 re-packages the footage as MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, the combination phones, laptops and smart TVs all play without complaint. Convert it once and the Christmas of 1994 works on every device in the family.
Four Minutes of a Forty-Five-Minute Reel
The converted tape runs forty-five minutes. Your grandparents' 40th anniversary toast is somewhere around minute 31, and it lasts four minutes. That is the part everyone will want to watch.
Trim Video lets you set a start and an end point against the preview and download only the section between them. Four minutes is something you can post in the family group, play at the reunion or attach to Grandpa's profile in the tree.
The 1,500-Word Limit for the Society Journal
The society journal accepted your article on the Weber emigration, with one condition: 1,500 words, including captions. Your draft has footnotes, a sidebar and a long paragraph about ship manifests that you are quite attached to.
Paste it into Word Counter and you see the count, the characters and the reading time as you cut. Trim the manifest paragraph until the number reads 1,498, and the editor gets exactly what they asked for.
Five record PDFs, one register, a shoebox of prints, a cassette and a camcorder tape. None of that is research, but all of it has to be dealt with before the research can be shared with the people it belongs to.
With those chores handled in a browser tab, your evenings go back to the part you love: the census page where the missing brother finally turns up, the ship manifest with a familiar name spelled wrong, and the moment a family story you grew up with turns out to be true.