Method
Every claim on this site carries its confidence. A thing that is documented says so; a thing that is family tradition says that too, and is kept anyway, because pretending otherwise is how family myths become family history.
The five labels
| documented | A named source with a reference, and where possible the scan itself. |
| inferred | A reasoned conclusion drawn from documented facts, with the reasoning written out in full so that it can be overturned by anyone who finds it wanting. |
| superseded | Asserted in the family record, and now displaced by a document that says otherwise. |
| disputed | Asserted in the family record but unsupported, or contradicted, by what can be seen. |
| family lore | Told, remembered, not corroborated. Kept because it is precious; labelled because pretending otherwise is how family myths become family history. |
Living people
Living people are omitted from this build entirely — not hidden, not gated behind a login, not present in the output at all.
The rule is applied once, in code, at the boundary between the research data and the published site — so a person cannot be living on one page and dead on another.
Judging people only by their own dates does not work on a tree this size, because thousands of them have no dates at all: medieval nobility, unnamed spouses, half-remembered great-aunts. Treating all of those as living is safe but useless — it would withhold the fourteenth century. So instead the build computes, for every person, an upper bound on their birth year: the latest year they could possibly have been born, given their own recorded events, their children's births, their marriages and their parents' bounds. Somebody is published only when even that latest possible birth is more than a hundred years ago.
Every step of that reasoning is a genuine bound rather than a guess — a parent is at least fourteen years older than their child and at most sixty; a person existed at their own recorded events. A recorded birth is never overridden by inference, because an inference that made a living person look older would publish them. Where nothing whatever is known, the person is presumed living.
On this build the rule judges 2,034 of the 15,643 people in the tree to be living, and removes 4 from the ancestor set. Where a living person sits between two published generations, the line is shown as continuing but the person is not named — and a living spouse, parent or child is not named on anybody else's page either.
A removal request is honoured within days, without argument and without requiring a reason.
Where the data comes from, and what that means
The spine of this archive is a MyHeritage family tree of 15,643 people, exported to GEDCOM and parsed here. That is a starting point and not an authority. An online tree records what somebody believed; this archive's job is to say which of those beliefs survive contact with a document.
So the tree is treated as a witness rather than a source. Where it carries a citation, the citation is shown on the person's page and marked as attached in the tree rather than checked here. Where this archive has gone to the original, the page says so.
How to read a pedigree chart on this site
Every person page opens with one, and the border down the left edge of each card says how that relationship is known — nothing else. It is the only thing the border encodes, because conflating "this is my ancestor" with "this is proved" is how a pedigree starts lying.
| The border | Means | The card also says |
|---|---|---|
| Solid | the link is written down in a record this archive has opened and read | which record — a registration number, a file reference, a deposition |
| Dotted | the link comes from the family tree and has not been tested | tree |
| Dashed, name struck through | the link comes from the tree and sits above one of the two joins this archive has tested and rejected | which graft — Hornby or Keele |
Corrections
A correction is the most valuable thing anyone can send this archive. If something here is wrong — a date, a place, a join, a person who should not be published — say so, and it will be changed and the change recorded.