About
An evidence-first archive of the D'Arcys of Brisbane, kept to the same method as five sibling archives — and the rules it will not break to make a better story.
This archive exists because a family had a tree that reached the kings of Denmark and nobody had ever asked it a hard question. It is one of six, kept to the same method and by the same hand. The other five →
What it is willing to say, and what it is not
- A family tree is not a source. It is a set of assertions. Of 639 entries in the register, 166 rest on a document; the rest rest on somebody's tree, and every page says which is which. The register →
- A null result is a result. Every source read and found empty is published, so the next person does not repeat the search. What has been read →
- Errors stay on the page where they were made. 13 so far, each with what caused it. Corrections are never made silently. The errors →
- Living people are not published at all. Not hidden, not gated — absent from the build. The rule withholds 2,034 people across the tree, including their names wherever they would appear as somebody's spouse, parent or child. How the rule works →
- A better story is not a reason. Two aristocratic descents have been taken off this family — one unevidenced, one disproved — and both are still set out in full rather than deleted. Both grafts →
What it holds
| people published | 473 | of a tree that also holds 2,034 living people, none of them here |
| named in records | 118 | including 90 who are not relatives at all |
| register entries | 639 | 166 from a document, 473 from the tree |
| sources read | 77 | 34 yields, 28 nulls, 15 unreachable |
| errors corrected in public | 13 | plus 6 inherited from the tree |
| generations it will defend | ≈7 | not the twelve the tree claims |
This archive had drifted to the wrong side of the world
It exists to test a British ancestry: a Gloucestershire yeoman, a Staffordshire weaver, a Royal Engineer at Chatham. Of the 166 records it now holds, 95 come from Australian sources and 70 from British ones.
| Where the evidence comes from | Records | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Australian — Queensland registration, QSA, NAA, AWM, Trove, the Blue Books | 95 | 57% |
| British — FreeREG, FreeBMD, the census, TNA, the London Gazette | 70 | 42% |
The result is that the best-evidenced part of a British family history is its emigration. That is worth knowing, and worth correcting. Every source, and which country it is in →
How it is built
A MyHeritage GEDCOM export is parsed in Python, living people are removed by a graph-wide rule rather than a flag, and the result is rendered as a static site with Astro and published to GitHub Pages. Nothing is generated at request time and there is no database — everything you can read here is in the repository, including the tools that built it.