The method & FAQ
A short account of the thinking behind the site, and answers to the questions people ask first.
The method, in one paragraph
Conventional genealogy software pushes you toward a single tidy tree: one birthplace, one mother, one answer per box. Real records don’t cooperate — they’re contradictory, partial, and written by people with their own errors and agendas. This site takes the opposite stance. It records every claim as “this source says X”, keeps the disagreements visible, treats identity as a question rather than an assumption, and lets the picture emerge from how the evidence connects. You do the judging; the site makes sure you have everything you need to judge well, and never quietly throws a record away.
Frequently asked
Why does one person have two birthplaces (or two mothers)?
Because two sources disagreed and the site keeps both rather than guessing. Look at each claim’s source and maturity to weigh them — see Reading the evidence.
A name I searched returned nothing — is that person not here?
Maybe not yet, or maybe under a different spelling. Try variants, a first name plus a place, or search someone connected to them and walk the kin links. The Searching page lists the tactics.
What do the E0–E4 badges mean?
They’re the maturityof a claim — how far it’s been corroborated, not whether it’s true. E2 means it was drawn from a source and anchored to a passage; E4 means independent sources agree. Full table on the person-page guide.
Can I trust the Federal Court / a certificate / a published tree?
Trust it as a witness, not as the last word. Every source here — official or not — is recorded as an attestation that can be weighed against others. Official records carry errors; oral memory sometimes preserves what paper lost.
Where does the data come from?
From the source documents on the Sourcespage — testimony, research findings, dossiers, transcribed records — with each fact anchored back to the passage it was drawn from. Nothing on a person page exists without a source behind it.
What is “donto”?
donto is the evidence-first claim substrate this site runs on — the same machinery is used for other kinds of contested knowledge. Genealogy is its hardest test. If you want the technical model (claims, evidence chains, confidence, alignment), it’s documented at donto.org/docs.
Is this a finished family tree?
No — and deliberately so. It’s a living record of evidence that grows as sources are added and corroborated. Contradictions you see today may be resolved by a document found tomorrow; the structure is built to absorb that without losing what came before.
Going further
Start at Getting started for the five-minute tour, or jump straight to the Peopleindex and follow your nose. The site rewards wandering — the connections are where the discoveries are.