A family, from my great-great-grandmother and grandfather downward. Not a chart of names and dates — an account, in the first person, as each of them might have given it.
Everyone speaks for themselves. Each page is written as autobiography — I was born, I worked, I stayed — because a life reads differently when it is not being described from outside.
Their voice where there is one. Where a recording exists, that is them. Where none does, a close synthesis stands in — and every page that uses one says so, plainly, on the page. A reconstructed voice passed off as a real one is the one thing this must never do.
Nothing is filled in. No date, no place and no story appears without a source. Where the record is silent, the page stays silent too. A family history that quietly closes its own gaps is worth less than one that shows them.