The research standard
How We Know What We Know
This archive is built to be checked. The rules below govern what may be published, at what confidence, and under what conditions a conclusion changes.
Principles
Six commitments
No claim without a status
Every historical statement in this archive is tagged with one of five evidence statuses before it is published. An untagged statement is a defect, not a shortcut.
Oral tradition is evidence, not proof
Family accounts are recorded faithfully and preserved as Family Tradition. They are never silently upgraded to documented fact, and they are never discarded because a record has not yet been found.
Absence is documented
Where enslavement, courthouse loss, or administrative indifference destroyed the record, the archive names the specific gap and the specific cause rather than presenting a smooth narrative.
No inference presented as fact
Dates are not estimated into birth years, relationships are not assumed from surname or proximity, and no portrait is ever substituted with a lookalike. Where a real photograph exists but survives only as a degraded reproduction, the archive may publish a digital restoration of it. Such an image is always labelled a derived likeness, is never presented as an archival image, and never counts toward a verified portrait.
Conclusions may change
New evidence can revise or overturn a published conclusion. Revisions are logged in the Research Ledger with a date and a reason; nothing is edited away quietly.
The family is the subject
This archive documents the Smith–Tolliver generations as people with property, labor, faith, and movement of their own — not as prologue to a single event.
Sources
Hierarchy of evidence
- 01Original records created at the time of the event by a participant or official witness
- 02Original records created near the time of the event by an informed party
- 03Derivative records: transcriptions, indexes, and compiled abstracts
- 04Published genealogies and secondary compilations, used only as finding aids
- 05Oral tradition and family memory, recorded and preserved as its own category
Definitions
The five statuses in full
Direct documentary evidence supports the claim.
Multiple independent pieces of evidence support the conclusion.
The story has been preserved through family memory, oral history, or later family accounts but has not yet been independently established.
Evidence is incomplete, conflicting, or actively being researched.
Earlier family or public accounts conflict with stronger evidence and have been revised.
Authorship
Attribution policy
Amberly R. Carter-Mills is the founder, lead researcher, and author of this archive. Attribution is permanent and non-transferable. Research briefs, claims, corrections, and notes published here carry her name and a version date, and may be cited accordingly.