Guide

Reading the evidence

The whole point of this site is that you can see where every fact comes from and decide how much to trust it. This page explains the signals it gives you for doing exactly that.

Every claim keeps its source

A claim here is never free-floating. Behind it is a chain: fact → the sentence it came from → the document revision → the original resource. That’s why a person page can tell you not just thatCaroline’s mother is recorded as Kitty, but which source said so and in what words. If a claim can’t be tied to a source, it’s marked as a hypothesis rather than dressed up as fact.

Maturity: how far a claim has been corroborated

Each claim carries a maturity level, shown as a small badge (E0–E4). It is nota measure of whether the claim is true — it’s a measure of how much work has gone into standing it up. Read it as “how much weight has this earned so far?”

`E0 hypothesis`	a possibility recorded so it isn't lost; not yet anchored to a source
`E1`	asserted with minimal support
`E2 extracted`	pulled from a source document and anchored to a specific passage
`E3 reviewed`	the anchor has been checked against the source
`E4 confirmed`	corroborated by independent sources

Low maturity isn’t a flaw

A century-old single-source claim sitting at E2 is normal and useful. The level tells you to keep looking for corroboration — not to throw the claim away.

Context: the provenance of a claim

Every claim belongs to a context— the body of work that produced it (a research wave, a particular dossier, a piece of testimony). You’ll see it as an identifier like ctx:genes/val-mauritius/… in the claims table and source chips. Two claims that disagree usually come from different contexts, and the context is your first clue about how to weigh them.

Contradictions are held, not resolved

When two sources make incompatible claims — two birthplaces, two mothers, two marriage dates — the site keeps both. The person page lists them under Contradictions held, each with its source, so the disagreement is visible instead of hidden.

Why keep both?

Because deleting one is a decision, and decisions in genealogy are reversible far less often than they should be. Holding the conflict lets a later source break the tie, lets you apply your own judgement, and keeps the losing claim available if the “winner” is overturned. A contradiction is a research lead, not an error.

How to act on a contradiction

Look at each side’s source and maturity, then ask what kind of record it is. A contemporary civil certificate generally outweighs a recollection recorded decades later — but note that, weigh it, and move on. You don’t have to make the conflict disappear.

Identity is a hypothesis

One of the hardest questions in family history is “are these two records the same person?” — the three different Kittys, the same name reused across a town. Here, sameness is itself a claimyou can support or refute, never an assumption baked in. The site will not silently merge two people into one, so you never inherit someone else’s guess as if it were established fact.

No authority is ground truth

A Federal Court determination, a parish register, an anthropologist’s field notes, and a family member’s memory are all recorded the same way: as “this source attests X.”None of them is treated as the final word. That’s deliberate — official records contain errors, and oral memory sometimes preserves what the paper trail lost. Your job (and the site’s) is to weigh witnesses, not to crown one.

The deeper mechanics — how claims, evidence, and confidence work in the substrate underneath — are documented at donto.org/docs.

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