Cladistic analysis often identifies local networks of terminals that are stable topologically, but these networks are joined in alternative ways to form the total cladogram. Connecting and rerooting networks in a few ways can lead to several most parsimonious trees that differ in overall cladistic structure enough to yield poor resolution in a consensus tree. This common (and often unrecognized) problem leads authors to despair that their data are ambiguous when in fact there are only a very few solutions. In this case, the local networks themselves and their alternative connections may provide a better summary of the original data matrix (a better representation of our knowledge) than does the consensus tree. We propose a method for retrieving the local networks forensically from tree files produced by parsimony analysis.