About
How this site works
This site is the public face of a family-history research database. It is generated every night from that database, and it shows the research as it stands, including what is still uncertain. Nothing is written by hand on these pages except this one; every name, date, place and source comes from the database, and every fact says how well it is supported.
What is here, and what is not
Deceased relatives are shown in full: events, places, sources, transcriptions, the research notes and, where the family owns the image, photographs and documents.
Living relatives appear by name and relationship only. No dates, places, photographs, documents or other facts. Whether someone is treated as living follows the database’s own rule (no death record and born within the last 110 years), with a short list of hand-corrections for people known to have died without a record yet and for anyone who asked not to be shown beyond a name. If you are on this site and would rather not be, or would like a correction, write to Chris.
Anything marked private in the database stays off the site. In practice that is the citizenship paperwork, vital records that carry identification numbers, and family letters.
Record images from Ancestry and FamilySearch stay behind the family login, as their terms require. What we wrote about those records — the citation, the transcription, the reasoning — is ours and is public. Images we own or scanned ourselves are published once they are marked public in the database.
How to read the evidence
Every fact carries an evidence ladder: its sources, ranked. The tiers, from strongest to weakest:
| tier | meaning |
|---|---|
| record | the original record was read from its image (a parish register page, a ship manifest, a census sheet, a certificate) |
| index | an index entry or transcription without the image |
| compiled | a published genealogy or family compilation that cites records |
| tree | a member tree, a hint, a reunion book — a lead, not evidence |
| oral | family memory |
| AI draft | a statement generated by an assistant that has not yet been checked against a record |
Most citations imported from Ancestry do not carry a tier yet. Until a reviewer sets one, the site estimates it from the kind of source (a census sheet with its image is a record, an index stays an index, Find a Grave and published family histories are compiled, member trees are trees) and marks it est. An estimated tier is a guess about the source, not a judgement of the fact.
Beside the tier sits the confidence the researcher assigned (one to four dots) and the review state: reviewed means a person checked the fact against its source; AI-checked means an automated checker read the fact and its citation and found no conflict; unreviewed means nobody has looked yet; needs a look means the checker flagged a conflict or could not read the record. Most of the tree was imported from Ancestry in October 2026 and starts unreviewed. The site will say so for as long as that is true.
When sources disagree, the fact shows the reading the research currently keeps, and the conflicting readings are in the notes on the citations. The open-questions page lists what is still unsettled.
Where the data lives
The research database is Gramps, kept on the family server, with a private web front end for family members. This site is a static copy of the public-safe part of it, rebuilt nightly and hosted on GitHub Pages. Every page links to its record in the database for those with a login.
The state of the research, in numbers
- People
- 319 published in full; 65 living people by name only
- Facts
- 888 — 0 reviewed by a person, 0 AI-checked, 888 unreviewed
- Citations
- 1192 from 187 sources — 0 reviewed, 0 AI-checked, 1192 unreviewed
- Images
- 0 public, 174 behind the family login
- Database
- Gramps 6.0.8, exported 2026-10-28 with the living rule at 110 years
Family members can ask Chris for a login to the research database, which holds the record images and the private papers.