About This Project
The Database
Built from the lifelong genealogical research of George Lack — boxes of birth certificates, obituaries, census records, military papers, and handwritten notes — digitized, indexed, and cross-referenced into a searchable archive. Every person has a confidence score. Every document is linked to every name it mentions.
The Practice
Extended by Ryan Lack as a project at the intersection of genealogy and art practice — measuring what survives, performing what doesn't, and refusing to let people be forgotten. The site itself is a living research instrument: every visualization is built from the raw data.
What's Here
1,251 individuals across 600 family names, connected by 2,046 relationships. 1,463 scanned documents — photographs, certificates, wills, newspaper clippings — with OCR text extraction and AI-assisted vision analysis.
Data Confidence
Every record is scored for reliability. Some people are documented with a dozen primary sources. Others exist only as a name on a census line. The system tracks this honestly — no invented certainty.
Explore
Coverage
How It Works
The database was built from a GEDCOM export of George Lack's genealogical research, enriched with document scanning, OCR text extraction, and AI-assisted vision analysis. Every scanned photograph, certificate, and newspaper clipping has been indexed and cross-referenced against the people in the database.
Confidence scores are computed from the number and quality of supporting documents. A person backed by a birth certificate, census records, and family photographs scores higher than someone known only from a single marriage record. The system is honest about what it knows and what it's guessing.
The visualizations — graph, tree, globe, atlas, rivers, places map — are all generated from the same underlying SQLite database. Nothing is decorative. Every node is a person. Every edge is a documented relationship. Every dot on the map is a real place where someone was born, married, or buried.
This is also an art project. A letter to a dead grandfather. A tool for tracing connection. A machine for watching time pass through families. And a set of thirteen ways of looking at lineage.