How This Family History Is Researched
Every story on this site rests on one rule, so it is worth stating plainly:
The one principle
In genealogy, a confident wrong answer is worse than "I don't know." So this family history reports facts about records, not claims about people — and it stops where the record falls silent.
Facts about records, not claims about people
"This birth has no source attached" is a fact about the data. It is a very different thing from asserting where or when someone was actually born. This site tries hard to keep those two apart: it will tell you what the records say and how well they say it — and where they say nothing, it says "unknown" and goes no further. No invented people, names, dates, places, or sources.
Every fact is graded by how good the evidence is
Not all sources are equal, and pretending they are is how folk legends harden into "fact." Each claim here is tagged by an evidence tier:
| Tier | Means | Examples on this site |
|---|---|---|
| A — Primary | An original record or official authority | A 1666 Court of Chancery suit; the U.S. Census; a Kentucky Historical Society marker; a Revolutionary War pension file |
| B — Scholarly secondary | Authoritative reference works | The Dictionary of American Family Names; academic place-name surveys |
| C — Aggregated / estimated | Model-based or compiled data | Surname-distribution estimates |
| D — Unverified tree / folk lore | User-submitted trees, "crest" sites, oral tradition | "Sir Thomas Caudle"; the unsourced "from Scotland" legend; commercial coats of arms |
When a Tier-A record and a Tier-D legend disagree, the record wins — and the legend is kept, but clearly labelled as a legend rather than quietly dropped or quietly promoted.
How the family tree itself is checked
Behind these stories sits a working family tree of several hundred people. It is audited by a deterministic check that can only count what is or isn't recorded — so it cannot invent anything. Its findings come in four kinds, ordered from "just a note" to "a real problem":
- Sourcing — a fact with no citation yet. A pure observation about the data, not a doubt about the fact.
- Gap — a record that is simply absent. A place to research, not a claim that anything is wrong.
- Soft — something worth a human's eye (an unusually long lifespan, a possible duplicate), explicitly not asserted as an error.
- Hard — a genuine logical impossibility, verified against exact dates. This is the only category that means "something here is definitely wrong."
The parentage of John A. Caudill is a worked example of a hard finding: a father recorded as five years old at his son's birth is impossible under any reading of the dates, so it gets resolved — carefully, against the original records.
Contradictions are flagged, not papered over
A date is only called impossible when it is impossible under the most charitable reading — anything approximate or partial is treated as uncertain and left alone. And when new evidence corrects something already published, the correction is added and dated rather than silently rewritten:
📝 Edits & Corrections
YYYY-MM-DD: what changed, and the new evidence that changed it. Genealogy is iterative; a visible correction is a feature, not an embarrassment.
How to read the posts
- A highlighted box marks a fact drawn straight from a record.
- Indented, dotted-border text marks family tradition, a lead, or anything not yet proven.
- Every post ends with its Sources, so any claim can be checked.
That is the whole method: cite it, grade it, or say "unknown" — and never let a good story outrun its evidence.
Further reading on the method
- The Genealogical Proof Standard (Board for Certification of Genealogists) — the discipline of reasonably exhaustive research, complete citation, and resolving conflicts.
- Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained — the standard reference for citing genealogical sources.
Part of an ongoing, source-disciplined family history. The method is the point: facts are cited, tradition is labelled, and the record's silences are respected. Corrections welcome.