Limits

What this corpus does not say

This database is a state of survey work, not a complete census of the Christian communities of the Holy Land. It covers the collections actually surveyed to date, and nothing else.

A documentary silence is never the absence of a person: it is the absence of a surviving register, of a digitisation campaign, or of survey work already done. The Coverage page provides what is needed to judge which kind of silence it is.

2,098 records of the corpus fall outside the 1500-1800 period: they are not published, together with the 9,268 mentions they carry. They remain kept in the working database.

Mentions are not linked to people yet

Mention-by-mention linking has not been added to the published corpus yet. Reconstructed people therefore cite the records that prove them, but the exhaustive list of their mentions is not shown. This is a limit of the current state of the work, not a display choice.

As a result, the roles carried by the records (godfather, godmother, witness, party) are not yet tied to reconstructed people, and the "Around this person" section of the family view stays empty.

0 / 212,889

Lineages are not named

The home graph shows groups of people connected by attested kinship links, without family names. Naming a lineage is a reconciliation decision, never a statistical inference on names: until that validation happens, the groups stay anonymous.

0 / 114

Digitised folios are still rare

Folio images are added to the site one at a time, as permissions and digitisation campaigns allow. Records whose folio has not been added show an explicit empty placeholder, never an image of another document.

33 published records out of 34,990 show their digitised folio.

Places are names, not coordinates

A place mentioned in a record is first of all a spelling. A declared origin is not a place of residence, and a mention "of Bethlehem" does not mean the event took place there.

14 places