Method, labels and downloads
How this site is built, what each label means, how living people are handled, and how to get the data back out into a genealogy program.
Where everything comes from
There are exactly two inputs: the family tree file pascal_clarkson_cleaned.ged(GEDCOM 5.5.1) and the folder of archive scans and index documents beside it. Every page is generated from those at build time. No fact is typed into the website by hand, so the site cannot drift away from the tree — correct the GEDCOM and the site follows.
The one exception is the research plan on the open questions page, which is written by hand insite/content/leads.json, because a plan is not a fact about a person.
What the labels mean
Genealogical claims are not equally solid, and the tree already records how solid each one is in its QUAY values. The site reads those directly:
| Label | Comes from | Means |
|---|---|---|
| Primary record | QUAY 3 | An official record or an archive's own index of one: a birth, marriage or death certificate, a register entry. |
| Compiled source | QUAY 2 | A compiled family tree that cites records but that has not been checked against them here. |
| Contested | a note beginning CONFLICT | Two sources disagree and nothing yet decides between them. |
| Resolved | a note beginning RESOLVED | A conflict that records have now settled. The note says which way and why. |
| Needs checking | a note beginning CHECK: | Something looks odd and deserves a second look, but nothing contradicts it outright. |
| No record found | a note saying so | Actively looked for and not found. Different from never having looked. |
| Unverified | QUAY 1 or no citation | In the tree on family knowledge. Not wrong — untested. |
| Not shown | presumed living | Withheld, see below. |
Living people
A person is shown only if a death is recorded for them, or if their own dates — or those of a datable relative — put their birth before 1926. Everyone else is treated as living and appears only as “Living person”, keeping their position in the family structure and nothing else: no name, no dates, no places, no notes. Marriages are withheld whole if either partner is living. Of 271 people in the tree, 102 are shown and 169 are withheld.
Because the rule errs towards privacy, some long-dead people with no dates at all are hidden too. That is deliberate: there is no way to tell them apart from the living without evidence.
Taking the data with you
Two GEDCOM files are published, both GEDCOM 5.5.1 with CRLF line endings:
- pascal_clarkson_cleaned.ged — the working tree, with all sources and notes. This is the file to edit.
- pascal_clarkson_with_media.ged — the same tree plus
OBJEmultimedia records pointing at the scan files, so a genealogy program attaches the images on import. Generated; never edit it by hand.
Importing into MobileFamilyTree 8.5.4 on iOS, with the images
- Download
pascal_clarkson_with_media.ged. - Put it in a folder, and put the scans in a sub-folder called
evidence/scans/beside it — that is the relative path the file refers to. - Move the whole folder into the Files app (On My iPhone → MobileFamilyTree), then import the
.gedfrom inside the app.
If the images do not attach, import the plain file instead and add pictures from the evidence pages here — every scan has a download link, and the source reference is printed with it.
Also published:the full research report,the evidence index (CSV), andthe raw Open Archieven search results (CSV).
What was searched
Open Archieven (api.openarch.nl) was searched for every Clarkson and every van Ede van der Pals record, returning 2,518 index hits. Everything plausibly connected to this family was then pulled in full and, where the archive serves an image, downloaded. That means a statement here that a record “was not found” is a real negative over the Dutch regional archives that feed Open Archieven — not a statement about records held elsewhere, and in particular not about the Netherlands Indies, South Africa or Guyana, which that index barely covers.
Credits
Record images are reproduced from the Dutch regional archives named on each evidence page — among them the Zeeuws Archief, West-Brabants Archief, Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum, Stadsarchief Rotterdam, Noord-Hollands Archief, Regionaal Archief Alkmaar, Regionaal Archief Nijmegen, Gelders Archief, Erfgoed Leiden, Het Utrechts Archief, Stadsarchief Breda and the Nationaal Archief — via openarchieven.nl, for family research.