The standards this field publishes, and where we go past them.

Requires: reasonably exhaustive research; complete and accurate citations; thorough analysis and correlation; resolution of conflicting evidence; and a soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.

Every conclusion we hand you has been through all five. Where a document corrects itself — an amended age, a struck-through year — both readings are recorded and the tie is broken from outside that document, because arithmetic that works is not the same as arithmetic that is right.

Requires: planned research, documented as it is done; sources recorded at the moment of use; and conclusions revised in the open when new evidence arrives.

Research is scoped in writing before it starts. Findings are staged as they are read and written up in one pass, so nothing survives only in somebody’s memory of a conversation. Nothing is ever deleted — a withdrawn conclusion is reclassified and kept, with the reason.

Requires: citations assembled in a fixed element order, and a clear separation between the source, the information in it, and the evidence it provides.

Citations are built in her element order — creator, jurisdiction, record, then how it reached us. And where one document carries facts from different mouths, we name them: on a death certificate the date of death is the physician’s, while the birth date and the parents are a grieving relative’s. One page, two informants, two weights.

Required by nothing. Common practice is a single confidence label, if any.

We keep how sure we are apart from what we actually examined, and neither may prop up the other. An index entry can never be called Documented, however plausible it is. A copy of a copy promotes nothing. An inscription in a hand nobody can identify settles no face.

Required by nothing. An empty search is usually invisible, and so it is repeated.

Every record class searched without result is written up: what was looked at, over what span, and why it was reasonable to expect something. You paid for that search once. Nobody — including us, two years later — should pay for it again.

Archival practice requires: records kept in the grouping and order they arrived in, described rather than rearranged, with their custody recorded.

Photographs are filed by where they came from — the envelope, the album, the relative, the date it passed to you — and never by who is in them. Browsing by person or by decade is a view generated on top of that, never a folder. Where an album was broken up before we ever saw it, that order is simply gone, and we say so rather than invent one: two photographs sitting together in a box is not evidence that the people in them are related.

The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation require: more than one copy in more than one place; checksums recorded and re-verified; open formats; and metadata that travels with the file.

Every image is checksummed as it arrives. A byte-identical duplicate is refused; a second print of the same photograph is accessioned in full and linked to the first, because two versos in two hands are two witnesses. Copies live in more than one place, the store is re-verified on a schedule, and each image’s description is a plain-text file beside it — readable in fifty years by anything that can read a text file.

The Association of Professional Genealogists’ code of ethics requires: a written agreement before work begins, no guarantee of a particular result, and client confidentiality.

No membership obliges us to follow it. We follow it. Scope in writing first; the possibility of finding nothing stated before you engage us, not after; and no client named, shown or quoted without their specific written permission.

Required by nothing, for a private family site.

Living people are withheld by default and are absent from a published site rather than blacked out in it — a redaction still announces that somebody is there. The data behind the site is built the same way: what is withheld is recorded, the value itself is kept somewhere the site cannot reach, and the site is correct with or without it.