# KleioBase blog

Research notes and product writing from the KleioBase team.

- [Italian Processetti and Allegati: The Marriage Packet That Reaches Back to the 1700s](https://kleiobase.com/blog/italian-processetti-allegati-marriage-packets): The marriage act is one page. Filed beside it is a folder of birth extracts, death certificates and sworn statements that reaches back into the 1700s. It exists because Napoleonic law made a couple prove which of their ancestors were dead before it would let them marry. Here is what is inside, and where it does not exist.
- [Pre-1858 English Wills: What They Prove, and Who They Leave Out](https://kleiobase.com/blog/pre-1858-english-wills-what-they-prove): An English will is a list of who was still owed something, not a list of who was born. The Statute of Distributions of 1670 names the mechanism behind most of the gap, and Evidence Explained says the rule everyone repeats about married children is not a rule at all. Here is what a pre-1858 will actually proves.
- [What Archives Charge to Copy a Record, and Why One Bills You for Finding Nothing](https://kleiobase.com/blog/what-archives-charge-to-copy-a-record): The National Archives charges £38.95 per fifteen minutes to search for a record, and does not refund it if the record is not there. ScotlandsPeople sells a will for £2.50. NARA will not take an order under $20. Nobody puts these side by side, so here they are, with what each one actually buys you.
- [How Accurate Are Family Stories, Really?](https://kleiobase.com/blog/how-accurate-are-family-stories): Family stories are not lies, and they are not transcripts either. Psychologists and historians who study how memory travels between generations have found a consistent pattern: some parts of a story survive almost untouched, and other parts change in predictable ways. Here is which is which, and how to test the difference.
- [Kirk Session Records Name the Father. Here Is What They Actually Prove.](https://kleiobase.com/blog/kirk-session-records-illegitimate-father-scotland): When a Scottish baptism says "natural son" and names no father, the parish's church court often wrote him down. But the Church of Scotland's own 1707 rulebook said a woman's word alone was not proof. Here is how to read a session minute, and which entries you can build on.
- [Your Ancestor's Records Just Say "Germany." Here Is Which Column Names the Town.](https://kleiobase.com/blog/find-immigrant-ancestor-town-of-origin): There was no Germany when your ancestor left it. The town is usually recorded somewhere, but only on certain forms, and only after certain dates. Here is which record has the column, what year it was added, and which of the three columns on a 1907 manifest is the one worth trusting.
- [What It Actually Costs to Get an Old Record Read](https://kleiobase.com/blog/what-it-costs-to-get-an-old-record-read): A free tool, a paid tool and a human translator will quote you nothing, about fifteen cents, and about ten dollars for the same page. They are not competing offers. Here is what each one actually costs in 2026, what you get for it, and when paying a person is the only right answer.
- [Which AI Actually Reads Your German Church Record?](https://kleiobase.com/blog/which-ai-reads-german-church-records-kurrent-latin): Every tool says it handles German. Nobody has published a test on an actual Kirchenbuch page, or on a Latin parish register, and the accuracy figures on the landing pages have no methodology behind them. Here is what each tool's own model catalogue shows, which model to run, and why FamilySearch's full-text search will not do this for you yet.
- [Which Pages of a 200-Page Pension File Actually Matter?](https://kleiobase.com/blog/which-pages-civil-war-pension-file-matter): The National Archives was asked to pick the pages of a Civil War pension file that carry the genealogy. It picked eight. Here is what those are, why the file is in a known order you can navigate by position, and which of the other 190 pages you can safely skim.
- [Why Two Families Should Never Share One Archive](https://kleiobase.com/blog/workspaces-keeping-client-research-separate): Workspaces are live: a completely separate knowledge base for each family you research, on Professional. They matter for a reason that is not tidiness - researching an unrelated family inside your own archive raises your false-match rate, and conflation is the genealogical error that does the most lasting damage.
- [Breaking a Genealogy Brick Wall: The FAN Club Method](https://kleiobase.com/blog/breaking-genealogy-brick-walls-fan-club-research): A brick wall is rarely a missing record. Far more often it is a record that exists, names your ancestor, and is filed under somebody else's name. Cluster research is how you find it.
- [What Not to Publish: Privacy and Ethics in Family History](https://kleiobase.com/blog/genealogy-privacy-ethics-publishing-family-data): Genealogy is the only research field where most of your subjects never agreed to be studied. Where the law actually stands on the living and the dead, what the professional standards require, and a workable set of rules for the hard cases.
- [How Accurate Is AI at Reading Old Handwriting?](https://kleiobase.com/blog/how-accurate-is-ai-handwriting-transcription): Published error rates for AI transcription range from under 2% to over 35%, and both figures are honest. Here is what the research actually shows, why the standard accuracy metric is the wrong one for genealogy, and how to check a transcription you did not write.
- [Research Logs Track Where You Looked. Nothing Tracks What You Found.](https://kleiobase.com/blog/genealogy-research-evidence-layer): Your genealogy workflow stores two things: the searches you ran and the conclusions you reached. Everything in between, which is all of the actual evidence, sits in files you will not open again. Here is what that costs, and how to tell whether it is your real bottleneck.
- [Russian Empire Revision Lists: How to Read a Ревизская Сказка and Follow a Family Across 140 Years](https://kleiobase.com/blog/russian-empire-revision-lists-revizskie-skazki): Revision lists are the closest thing Eastern European genealogy has to a longitudinal record. Every entry carries two ages, and every person who disappeared between revisions has a reason written next to their name. Here is how the document works and where the surviving lists actually are.
- [How to Use Negative Evidence in Genealogy](https://kleiobase.com/blog/negative-evidence-in-genealogy): A search that found nothing only becomes evidence when the source should have recorded the event. Here are the five questions that make an empty search trustworthy, the five things to write down every time, and a worked example that turns a missing death record into the next place to look.
- [Julian or Gregorian? Reading Old Record Dates](https://kleiobase.com/blog/reading-dates-old-records-julian-gregorian-feast-days): Two brothers baptised on the same day can carry dates ten days apart, because one parish was Catholic and Gregorian and the other Lutheran and still Julian. Here is how to tell which calendar a record keeper used, what 1731/32 and Dominica Cantate mean, and how to convert a date without inventing a year.
- [How to Find Ancestors in Austrian Galicia: AGAD, the Lviv Archives, and Gesher Galicia](https://kleiobase.com/blog/austrian-galicia-records-agad-lviv-gesher-galicia): Austrian Galicia is the partition where the Polish State Archives will disappoint you. Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic and Jewish records all survive in quantity - they are just split across two countries. Here is where they actually are.
- [Polish State Archives Online: Szukaj w Archiwach](https://kleiobase.com/blog/polish-state-archives-szukaj-w-archiwach-guide): Szukaj w Archiwach, the Polish State Archives portal, publishes over 55 million scans for free with no account, but none of it is searchable by name. Here is how to find your town's parish or civil registers, and why reading each year's index first turns a day of scrolling into a few minutes.
- [Poznań Project and Prussian Partition Records](https://kleiobase.com/blog/prussian-partition-records-standesamt-poznan-project): The Poznań Project indexes every named person in over 1.8 million 19th-century Posen marriages, parents and witnesses included, so an ancestor can turn up at a neighbour's wedding. Here is how to use it, where church books end and the 1874 Standesamt registers begin, and where the scans are held.
- [The Family Tree That Shows You What Is Missing](https://kleiobase.com/blog/family-tree-that-shows-what-is-missing): The KleioBase family tree is live. Because it is drawn from your actual archive of records rather than a form you type into, it does what other trees cannot: it scores every profile for completeness and flags exactly where your research is thin.
- [How to Read Old German Records: Kurrent, Sütterlin, and the Handwriting Wall](https://kleiobase.com/blog/reading-old-german-records-kurrent-sutterlin): Most German records from before the 1940s look unreadable even to fluent German speakers. Here is why - and how to start reading Kurrent and Sütterlin.
- [Best Genealogy Software 2026: 10 Tools Compared](https://kleiobase.com/blog/best-genealogy-software-2026): Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, RootsMagic, Legacy, Gramps, three DNA tests and KleioBase, compared side by side: what each one is, how you pay, who it suits and the main trade-off. Most serious researchers use more than one, so this genealogy program comparison helps you pick a combination.
- [Getting Started with Genealogy Research: A Beginner's Guide](https://kleiobase.com/blog/getting-started-genealogy-research): A step-by-step guide for anyone starting genealogy research - from interviewing family and gathering documents to organizing your findings.
- [What AI Can and Cannot Do for Genealogy](https://kleiobase.com/blog/how-ai-is-transforming-genealogy): AI can read Kurrent, pre-reform Cyrillic and secretary hand well enough to give you a draft to correct, pull names and dates into fields, and flag two profiles that may be one person. It cannot judge a source, settle conflicting birth years, or find a record nobody digitised. Here is where the line sits.
- [Introducing KleioBase: AI-Powered Genealogy Research](https://kleiobase.com/blog/introducing-kleiobase): KleioBase uses AI to extract, organize, and connect your genealogy documents into a unified knowledge base. Built by a genealogist.
- [How to Organize Old Family Photos and Documents Digitally](https://kleiobase.com/blog/organize-family-photos-documents-digitally): How to digitize and organize old family photos, letters, and certificates - from scanning basics to building a structured research workflow.
- [How to Read Old US Census Records, 1790-1950](https://kleiobase.com/blog/reading-old-census-records): From 1850 the US census named every free person in a household, 1880 added each person's relationship to the head, and 1900 added the year of immigration. Here is what each census from 1790 to 1950 recorded, what "do", "Na" and "Al" mean in the columns, and how to read an enumerator's handwriting.
- [How to Move a Family Tree With a GEDCOM File](https://kleiobase.com/blog/understanding-gedcom-files): A .ged file is plain text you can open in any editor, and most programs still export version 5.5.1 from 1999 rather than GEDCOM 7 from 2021. Here is what the file holds, what gets lost between programs, from citations to images to non-Western names, and how to check an import before you trust it.

Canonical: https://kleiobase.com/blog