Levantine LivesA Historical Atlas of Christian Communities in the Ottoman Holy Land, 1500-1800
Because that memory stays locked in records few people can read, each person, each relation and each event traces back to its source at the folio.
Free to browse, no account needed, in French and English.
The search automatically finds known variants of a name (e.g. Isa, Aisa, ʿĪsā). No need to know the register’s exact spelling.
Trace a record to its context.
Every link shown leads back to the record that establishes it, with its call number and certainty level.
Graph of reconstructed people: 678 people, 929 attested kinship links, 101 connected groups. No lineage name is shown at this stage.
How to read this graph
- Grey points link reconstructed people through the records that name them. Their lineage has not yet been validated through reconciliation: the name will appear once this match is confirmed.
- 13 groups don’t fit into this diagram and aren’t shown.
- Thin lines: filiation. Coloured lines: marriage.
- Godparent and witness links appear on each person’s record, not yet in this graph.
Overview
678 reconstructed people and 929 reconciled family ties measure the progress of person-by-person linking, not the corpus’s overall coverage: every mention stays fully readable with its proof, linked or not.
- ✓ Certain, attested by a record
- ≈ Probable, converging evidence
- ? Possible, open hypothesis
- How these links are established
- What this corpus showsThree centuries of baptisms, marriages and deaths as curves, the peaks and troughs visible from year to year, the roles each person held within the community.
Period covered : 1500-1800 · Records with a translation : 34,972 · Records without dating : 3,761
Published scope: 1500-1800. See what is not published.
Search by period.
Behind each point, a line of handwriting.
One person followed across several collections: the Saint-Sauveur and Sainte-Catherine parish registers, the Jerusalem sijillat, the status animarum. Every link leads back to the page that proves it. The graph doesn’t replace the registers: it makes them navigable. Every reconstructed person stays linked to the mentions that name them, page by page.