How it fits together
One atlas in the middle. Eight archives around it.
The family archives on this site are not eight separate websites. They are eight windows onto one shared map of the world’s records, built so that whatever is found in one is useful to all the others.
Read it from the middle out
At the centre is Record Atlas: every place, the names it has had, who ruled it in a given year, and who holds the paper. Around it, each family archive reads from it, and sends back what it finds.
- The archive reads the atlas: names, places, rulers, records.
- What it finds goes back, so the next search starts further on.
What sits in the middle
Four things the archives would otherwise each have to guess at, kept once, with the evidence behind them.
The names, in every spelling
Ivan, Johann, Giovanni, Zuane and John are one given name. A surname is written five ways by five clerks. The atlas keeps the catalogue of which spellings are the same name, and what each rests on, so a search tries all of them.
surnames · given names · across languagesThe place, under its name that year
A register is indexed under the name its clerk used. Fiume is Rijeka; Salisbury is Harare. The atlas knows what a place was called, and when, so a search for today’s name does not miss yesterday’s book.
names by date · so nothing is missedWhose paper it was
A village changes ruler and its records move to another office. The atlas knows which empire’s filing system a place fell under in a given year, so it can say where to write, and whether anyone has opened the book.
rulers by year · who holds whatWhat was happening, and under what flag
Flags, borders and the events around a family, drawn from the same record of who ruled where. They sit beside a person’s story as context, never as a claim that this person saw them.
flags · history · the world around- 55,000+places
- 3.4 millionrecord volumes
- 90countries with archives
- 3catalogues of names
- 8family archives reading it
How one question travels
“A man called Zuane, baptised in Fiume in 1830.”
The name widens
The atlas knows Zuane is Giovanni, Ivan, Johann and Joannes, and which language each belongs to, so the search is not limited to the form on the family tree.
The place finds its year
Fiume is today’s Rijeka, and in 1830 it sat under Habsburg rule. That says which archive’s registers to look in, and under which name they are indexed.
The shelf is checked
The atlas lists the volumes that cover that place and those years, and whether anyone has read them. A book nobody opened looks different from a book somebody searched and found empty.
The archive tells it, graded
What is found goes into the family archive with a grade: documented, inferred, or family memory. It is never promoted by rewording. The result goes back to the atlas, so the next person does not search the same page twice.
Why it is built this way
Keep what the document says
A spelling is recorded as printed. Grouping names is for finding them, never a claim that two people are one.
One copy of anything shared
The pages, the evidence marks and the checks are the same in every archive, so one fix reaches all eight, and a mistake cannot hide in one.
Checks that prove themselves
Every build runs dozens of checks, and each check is tested by planting the fault it is meant to catch. A check that cannot fail does not count.
The living are not published
One rule, the same everywhere, decides who may be alive. Anyone who might be is a name and a relationship, nothing more.
See it working
Search a name in every spelling, look up a village under any name it has had, or open one of the archives and follow a family.