How to use this site
genealogy.donto.org is an evidence-first family research site. Every fact you see keeps the source it came from, and when sources disagree it shows you both rather than picking a winner. This guide explains how to find things and how to read what you find.
What you're looking at
This isn’t a tidy family tree with one “correct” answer per person. It is a record of claims — statements like Caroline Rose Davis · mother · Kitty— each one tied back to the exact document and sentence it was drawn from. A person here is the sum of every claim made about them, with the contradictions left intact so you can judge for yourself.
The site in five minutes
There are four ways in, all reachable from the top menu:
Two search boxes on the home page: one searches the family graph (people, places, claims), the other searches inside the source documents themselves.
Browse everyone the substrate holds claims about. Click a person to see their kin, their claims, the contradictions held about them, and which sources attest them.
Every source document in full — testimony, research findings, dossiers. Each fact on a person page points back to one of these.
Long-form, professionally typeset accounts of a family line, with inline references throughout. Read in the browser or download the PDF.
Three ideas that explain everything else
The site behaves the way it does because of three principles. They’re covered in depth in Reading the evidence, but in short:
- No authority is ground truth.A Federal Court determination, a parish register, and a family member’s memory are all witnesses. Each claim is recorded as “this source says X”, never as settled fact.
- Identity is a hypothesis. Whether two records are the same person is itself a claim you can support or refute. The site never silently merges two people.
- Contradictions are kept. When two sources disagree, both survive. A contradiction is treated as evidence to weigh, not an error to delete.