Lives on one scale

The Timeline puts this family against the history that was happening to it, and says in its own dek that the point is not when people were born. This page is the other half: it is only about when people were born, and when they stopped.

Read the hollow bars first. A chart of neat bars reads as certainty, and that would be a lie about this archive. A bar is drawn solid only where the roster says the date was read off a register, an index of record or a headstone. Everything else came off a family tree and is drawn hollow. Across the whole roster that is 421 of 1041; on our own Carnia line it is 92 of 215 — almost exactly half. The hollow bars are the work still to do.

And an open end is not a short life. 583 of these 1041 people — 56 per cent, the majority — have one date and not the other. Their bar fades out rather than stopping square, because the archive does not know when they died and will not draw a guess. A faded end means «no burial register has been read for this person», and nothing more.

58 living people are excluded entirely — the rule in this archive is name and town and nothing else, and a chart of dates is no place to make an exception. A further 28 rows are left out because the roster marks them sameAs another row: they are the same life entered twice, and one life gets one bar.

What the shape of it says

The solid bars cluster. They sit where this archive has walked a register — Gologorica and Gračišće in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rijeka and Svetvinčenat in patches, the headstones at the end. Everywhere else the line is hollow, and that is not a judgement about the people: it is a map of which books have been opened.

The open ends are the burial registers nobody has read. A person with a birth and no death is almost always a person whose parish death book is sitting unread on a reel. On 6 October 2026 this archive opened one of them — the Gologorica deaths 1784–1880 — and the first two pages it looked at closed two open ends that had been argued over for a fortnight.

Built from roster.json, which is the archive's own list of people and is rebuilt whenever the roster changes. Nothing here is entered by hand, so the chart cannot drift from the roster; if a bar is wrong, the person's row is wrong, and that is the thing to fix.