A family history that shows its working.
Most family trees are confident and wrong. This one records what every claim rests on, how sure it is, and what contradicts it.
A tree on a big genealogy site is a pile of assertions with nothing attached. One person guesses, three others copy the guess, and the guess becomes a fact by repetition. Nothing in the format can tell you which parts are evidence and which are somebody’s Tuesday afternoon.
A claim is one fact about one person, small enough to check against one source. “Martha lived in this house in 1841” is a claim. “Martha was a devoted grandmother” is a story, built from many claims, and it comes last.
Every claim names its source, so anyone can find it and check it. Every claim carries two marks:
When two claims disagree, both stay, side by side. If later evidence shows a claim was wrong, a new claim says so and names the evidence. The old claim stays on the record. Whether two records show the same person is a claim too, and it stays open until the evidence settles it.
Only when the claims are in place does anyone write the life story.
In 1841, 147 people in Wigan shared the family’s surname, out of 25,524. One person in 174. A surname match there is worth nothing, so this household was identified on five independent points from five different sources: the occupation, a wife’s age, a child’s age, a street against a baptism address, and a grandmother whose stated age was wrong in exactly the way the 1841 rules required.
Names in these examples are changed. The records and the reasoning are real.
Every claim names the source it rests on.
Entry CLM-C41-03 A household in Wigan names changed
Entry · Not numbered One of Ed’s grandfathers names changed
Refuted
The archive holds more than 7,700 claims like these.
The seven kinds of source
| Kind of source | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Record | An official record made at the time: a census, a parish register, a certificate, a will, a ship’s passenger list |
| Primary | A document from the time by someone involved: a dated letter, a diary, a photograph, a witness interview |
| Press | A newspaper report from around the time |
| Reference | A later book or database built from other sources. Usually reliable, but second-hand |
| Oral | Someone remembering, years later, what they saw themselves |
| Hearsay | Someone passing on what another person told them |
| Inference | A conclusion worked out from other claims. Always the weakest kind |
The kind of source tells you how trustworthy the channel usually is. It cannot prove the fact. A diary can lie, and a census can be wrong.
Articles on doing this properly: reading a census transcript, building a claim grammar, keeping contradictions instead of resolving them, and putting research agents to work without letting them invent ancestors. Then the tool itself.