Literal token and search rule
The letters written in a source are preserved. Any search alias, transliteration, or fuzzy rule must be versioned and disclosed; none changes the literal field.
Methods
A hit is not a person. A person is not a lineage.
The evidence system keeps discovery, location, reading, identity, relationship, and publication as separate decisions. That separation is the archive's main defense against confident mistakes.
Evidence ladder
| Grade | Meaning | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| D0 | A repository, collection, source unit, or database is discovered. | No name occurrence. |
| D1 | A literal name-shaped hit appears in an index, OCR result, catalog, or contributed tree. | No verified reading or person. |
| D2 | A stable locator resolves to the intended page or item. | No transcription. |
| D3 | The original image is seen and the target entry is located. | Machine suggestions remain unverified. |
| D4 | A qualified human makes a first transcription from the original. | The fields remain provisional. |
| D5 | A blind second qualified reading agrees, or a qualified adjudicator documents the conflict. | A verified mention is still not automatically a resolved person or relationship. |
| D6 | Eligible mentions are correlated to a person through reviewed identity claims. | Each relationship remains a separate claim with separate evidence. |
Four separations we will not collapse
Mention and person
Two similar entries remain two observations until time, place, roles, associates, and competing identities support a reversible resolution.
Person and relationship
Resolving two mentions to one person does not prove that person's parent, spouse, child, or migration connection.
Research and publication
A private research conclusion still needs privacy, rights, editorial, citation, translation, accessibility, and correction checks before public release.
Literal-name handling in this release
Dobeš, Dobesh, Dobes, Dobešová, Dobesova, and every other declared form remain separately labeled inputs and counts. The site does not silently remove diacritics, convert feminine forms, pool totals, infer cognates, or claim a common founder. Future broader retrieval rules require a separately reviewed and adopted policy with false-positive tests.
Conservative 120-year publication rule
Living people remain private, and a death-unknown person is private by default. A narrow historical exception applies only when cited evidence establishes a latest possible birth date at least 120 years before the content-status date. Year-only calculations use a full-year safety buffer. When a role supplies the bound, R2 states its conservative minimum-age assumption: 18 for an adult and 12 for a parent. This is a publication presumption, not proof of death, identity, or relationship.
Publication standard
- Every factual statement resolves to a citation and evidence state.
- Material uncertainty and counterevidence appear with the claim.
- Living people stay private. Death-unknown people remain private by default unless cited evidence passes the conservative 120-year historical publication rule defined above and an item-specific review approves release.
- Access and reuse rights are decided separately for descriptions, transcriptions, and images.
- A correction marks every dependent page, language, search row, export, and machine-readable answer stale until rebuilt.
“Test everything; hold fast what is good.”