How a record is decided

Every factual statement on a person's page rests on a source that is named on the page. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement is published rather than settled quietly. Where nothing has been established, the page says so instead of filling the gap with a reasonable guess.

What a published record requires

A verified identity; a documented Charleston connection; a source for the biographical core, and a separate source for any rank, office, property or burial presented as fact. A missing portrait, home or grave is shown as not yet documented. The build refuses to publish a record that fails any of this, which is why the standard is not a promise but a mechanism.

Ownership is not residence

The commonest error in work of this kind is to turn a night's lodging into a family seat. Each connection between a person and a place carries one relationship from a fixed list, and the page uses that word. Owning, inheriting and co-owning are claims of title. Renting, boarding, lodging and living are claims of occupancy. Commanding from a house is neither.

Rank at the time

A man who ended the war a colonel was a captain in 1861, and the Charleston chronology says captain. Each period of service is its own record with its own dates, so a later promotion cannot be written back onto an earlier event.

A period address is not a modern one

Charleston renumbered its streets between 1882 and 1886 and no conversion table survives. A wartime street number therefore cannot be run through a modern geocoder to produce a building. Where only the period address is known, the location is given to the street or the block and labeled as such.

Graves

A burial date is not a death date. A person taken up and buried again is shown in both places, in order, with one marked as the present grave. A cenotaph is a monument where the body is not, and is never presented as a burial. Some locations are known and deliberately withheld — fragile markers, unmarked graves, private land, and sites where publishing a coordinate would invite damage.

Images

A caption repeated across the internet does not establish who is in a photograph. A portrait is published only where the identification is independently supported and the rights are clear. Nothing on this site is an AI-generated likeness. Where a photograph has been colorized, the original black-and-white scan is published beside it and remains the record — see how these were made.