Genealogy
evidence-first family research
Guide

People & person pages

The People page is the index of everyone the substrate holds claims about. Each person opens into a single view that gathers their whole record — kin, claims, contradictions, and sources.

The People index

The list shows family members ordered by how much is known about them — the N facts count next to each name is the number of claims held about that person. Use the search box at the top to filter by name (a surname, a full name, or a fragment). Click any name to open their page.

Who’s on the list
The index gathers entities whose identifier matches one of the family surnames (Lablanche, Maurel, Poitevin, Collinson, and so on). Someone attested only inside a document — a witness, a neighbour — may not appear here yet but can still turn up through search.

Reading a person page

A person page has four sections, top to bottom. Each answers a different question.

Kin & relationships

Every relationship the substrate holds for this person, as clickable chips — parents, spouses, children, and any other typed link. The label tells you the relation and direction; hover for the full reading (e.g. “this person → mother → Kitty”). Click a chip to walk to that relative’s page. This is how you move through the family.

Contradictions held

When two sources make incompatible claims about the same attribute, both are shown here, side by side, with the source of each — for example two different birthplaces, or two different mothers. This section is the heart of the method: the site does notresolve the conflict for you. It’s explained fully in Reading the evidence.

All claims

Every claim about the person, as a table of predicate · value · maturity · source. Values that are themselves people are links you can follow. The small badge on each row is the claim’s maturity— how far it’s been corroborated:

E0 hypothesisa possibility on the table; not yet anchored to evidence
E1asserted, minimal support
E2 extracteddrawn from a source document, anchored to a passage
E3 reviewedchecked against the source
E4 confirmedcorroborated across independent sources

The last column names the source context the claim came from, so you always know which body of work is making it.

Sources that attest this person

The documents that mention this person, each with a count of how many of their claims it supports. Follow these into Sources to read the original in full.

A typical workflow

Most research on the site follows the same loop:

  1. 1. Search a name (or open it from the People index).
  2. 2. On the person page, read the claims and note their maturity and source.
  3. 3. Check the contradictions — where do sources disagree, and which do you find more credible?
  4. 4. Walk a kin link to the next person, or open a source to read the original wording.
  5. 5. Repeat. The picture builds from the connections, not from any single record.