Methodology

A biographical archive lives or dies by the trust placed in its sentences. This page describes the standards the platform is accountable to. Where a page fails to meet them, that is a bug and a correction is welcome.

Citation rigor

Every factual claim on a place page, entity page, or long-form story traces to a named source. The source shortcode renders a small superscript next to the claim, and the source list at the foot of the page contains the full citation. Every occupancy row and every event row on the timeline carries at least one source as well. The build fails — literally refuses to produce a site — if a page cites a source that does not exist in the database. That last rule is the one that keeps the discipline honest. It means a broken citation is not an editorial oversight the reader has to catch; it is something the publisher cannot ship.

Sources are named archives, named books, named newspapers with a date, named deeds, or named oral histories with the narrator’s consent. The platform does not cite “tradition” or “local memory” as a source, and it does not cite itself.

Handling slavery and enslavement

Alexandria was a major slave-trading port. The archive treats this material the way a careful historian would: factually, without euphemism, and with the names the records preserve. When a name is preserved — in a will, a ledger, a Freedmen’s Bureau marriage record, a Civil War contraband list — that name appears on the page. Generic language like “enslaved laborers” is used only when specific names cannot be recovered.

Enslaver relationships are explicit in the data model, not hidden in prose. A person who enslaved others carries an enslaver_of relationship pointing to every named person they held, and the reciprocal enslaved_by relationship appears on the enslaved person’s entity page. The same applies to occupancy rows: an enslaved person living and working at a place appears with the enslaved_person role, not as a generic “resident.” The structure forces the visibility that narrative alone will let slide.

Enslavers’ treatment of the people they held is documented with the same citation standard as any other claim. Where contemporaries and later historians have disagreed about an enslaver’s conduct, both positions are summarized with their sources attached. The platform does not grade the morality of the historical subject; it records what the records say.

Contested historical figures

Robert E. Lee grew up in Alexandria. Samuel Cummings ran one of the largest private arms operations of the twentieth century from a warehouse on South Union Street. The slave-trading firm of Franklin and Armfield was headquartered a block from the waterfront. Each of these subjects arrives with a century or more of argument already attached.

The platform’s voice on these subjects is neutral. That does not mean it is silent about what happened. It means that the documented actions and the documented sources carry the weight, and the platform does not layer a contemporary political framing on top of a nineteenth-century record. Where contemporaries disagreed — as they did, sharply, in almost every case — both positions are summarized with citations. Where later historians have disagreed, the same applies. The reader can reach their own conclusion. The platform’s job is to make sure every conclusion the reader could reach is supported by the evidence on the page.

This neutrality is not a refusal to take the subject seriously. It is the opposite. A careful presentation of the records of the Franklin and Armfield operation, or of the Fort Ward contraband camp, is its own argument. An editorial overlay would dilute it.

Living persons

Some Alexandria figures relevant to recent history are still living. Living persons can be named in historical context when the facts are documented in public records — court filings, SEC filings, major newspaper coverage, books with named publishers. They are not photographed without consent, which means no portrait images on entity pages for living subjects. The full photographer’s brief covers consent, identifiable faces in crowds, photographing children, and credit conventions. They do not receive a full biographical entity page unless there is documented legitimate public interest and they qualify as public figures under the ordinary press standard.

When legal action involving a living person is part of the record, the platform documents only the facts that appear in public court records, and it links to those records. The platform does not publish home addresses beyond publicly-known business addresses, does not publish contact information, and does not publish details about minor children.

Descendants

The platform does not contact descendants of historical figures without the operator’s consent, and it does not name descendants without their permission unless they are themselves public figures. When a descendant disputes historical content on the site, the dispute is logged in the contributions record and considered on its merits. Descendants are sometimes in possession of records — family Bibles, letters, deeds — that no archive holds. The platform welcomes them as sources, credits them by whatever name they choose, and treats their contributions with the same citation rigor as any other.

Contested and political subjects

Alexandria’s history includes slavery, the Civil War, the segregation of the public library, the displacement of Black neighborhoods by mid-century urban renewal, redlining, and the Cold War arms trade. The platform covers all of this. The editorial standard is the one that applies throughout: document what the records show, note where sources disagree, do not speculate beyond the evidence, and let the voice be that of a careful historian rather than an advocate. The facts carry their own weight.

Corrections policy

Corrections are published transparently with a dated changelog on the place or entity page. A fix to a date, a corrected attribution, a disputed interpretation with a new source — each appears on the page’s own record so a reader can see what the page used to say and when it changed.

Contributors who submit valid corrections are credited by name or by a chosen pseudonym. Content is not removed at the request of people embarrassed by historical facts. Context and phrasing can be revised; the facts remain. This is the only editorial position on which the platform will not negotiate.

What this platform does NOT do

The platform does not use AI to generate biographical or narrative content. AI assists in research retrieval, formatting, and schema work — the same way a research assistant might — but every factual claim on the site traces to a named human source. A sentence in a place biography is not written by a model. It is written by a person, who read a cited archive or a cited book, and who is accountable for the citation.

The platform does not fill genealogical gaps with probability. If a record is missing, the page says so, and the missing record is visible. Nothing is invented.

The platform does not speculate beyond the records. Where the record runs out, the prose runs out. Sentences that would begin “it is reasonable to assume” or “we can imagine” do not appear.

The platform does not publish identifying details about private individuals without their consent. A current resident of a place whose name happens to appear in a public deed is not by that fact alone a subject of the archive.

These rules are the editorial frame for everything on the site. If something here fails the frame, file a correction. Every correction is credited. Every correction is logged.