Welcome!

This site is a very long term and large scale project. The ultimate goal and website philosophy can be summed up as:

A PROSOPOGRAPHY OF EUROPEAN ROYALTY, ARISTOCRACY, GENTRY AND THEIR DESCENDANTS.

Prosopography is the study of a set of individuals through the analysis of the totality of the known record remaining for each of the individuals in that set. We use it loosely here to refer to the act of collecting information, a central foundation for prosopography. The information of interest is anything that has ever been written on any of the members of the database, fully source referenced and, where possible, transcribed (in the case of out-of-copyright works). In other words, each person record should contain the sum of all knowledge that we have about that specific person, cited in full.

This is different from most personal websites which focus on an indivdual's immediate family, their ancestors, or a single-surname study in that the scope is significantly larger. It also differs from most collections of genealogical tables which reduce each person to a name and some dates. Although this is unavoidable in many cases due to lack of information, there is nevertheless available much additional material on many of the people so referenced, that are omitted on those sites but which many readers would find of interest. Finally, it also differs from the 'hardcore' genealogy websites that focus solely on gathering genealogical information, in that we also aim to include extended biographical records, letters, deeds, wills and any other documents pertaining to each person.

The ability to comment and add information by site visitors to each person's record is invaluable for reaching an accurate genealogy and as complete as possible record. We encourage visitors to comment frequently with opinions and references.

We also welcome suggestions and requests for which individuals to include next, if there is anything of specific interest, or if there are any improvements to the website structure that you would like to see.

It it ultimately our hope that a community will develop with an interest in the expansion and maintenance of this site.