Method

Three levels, never conflated

A record is a single document: a baptism, a marriage, a death, a status animarum, a judicial deed. It carries its language, date, place, text and call number.

A mention is one occurrence of a person inside a record: a name as written by a scribe, with the role that person played that day. The spelling of a mention is never rewritten.

A person is a reconstruction: several mentions brought together after examining the sources. It is the only level that results from reasoning, and that reasoning is published with it.

The proof stays attached

Every record carries its full provenance chain: the collection, the document, then the locator that lets you find the page again (film and image for microfilmed registers, call number and folio for edited corpora). A record without that complete chain is not published.

Transcriptions and translations are labelled for what they are: human-verified, automatic, or provenance not recorded. The verbatim source text is always shown alongside.

Two status systems, never merged

The first describes the certainty of a piece of data or a link: certain, when the source states it explicitly; probable, when converging evidence supports it without stating it; possible, when the hypothesis remains open. This level is shown relation by relation, never as a global summary.

The second will describe how a person relates to a historical event: documented impact, probable exposure, contemporary context. It belongs to the Events layer, which is not published yet. The two systems never mix: an event colour never states reliability, a certainty badge never states an event.

How people are reconstructed

Two mentions are never matched on the name alone. A match requires documented convergence: written filiation, rarity of a given name measured across the corpus, continuity of parish, household register. The justification of every link can be read on the record.

This work is carried out away from the site, in batches, and validated before publication. The site applies no automatic merge and suggests no computed match: what is displayed has been verified.

A match can be revised if a new source appears. No reconstruction is presented as final.

What the site publishes

The published scope is the one stated in the subtitle: records dated within the announced period. Records of the corpus falling outside it stay in the working database and are counted on the Coverage page, but are not served.

A separate rule forbids publishing any data naming a person who could still be alive. It applies to the result of the publication filter, not only to the table of people.