Your Knowledge Base

What the Knowledge Base is

The Knowledge Base is where your confirmed records become browsable data. Every time you confirm a record, the people, places, dates, and events it contains flow into one connected view of your research.

It is organized into sub-tabs: People, Records, Places, Timeline, Conflicts, and Trash. Opening /knowledge-base/people lands you on People. The interactive Family Tree view is built from the same data and has its own entry in the sidebar.

The data here comes from the records you process. To learn how records get in, see Uploading Records.

People

The People tab shows everyone in your tree. By default it is a grid of cards, and you can switch to a list view.

Find someone

• Search by name using the search box.
• Filter the list by birth place, a birth-year range, a death-year range, connection status ("connected", "disconnected", or "associates"), and "has matches".
• Sort by name, recently added, birth year, number of records, or number of matches.

Card view and list view

Use the view switch to move between card view and list view. List view also lets you select several people at once and delete them in bulk.

How names are shown

For married women, KleioBase treats the maiden (birth) name as the primary surname by default - the genealogical convention, since a married name can change over a lifetime. You can switch this to the married name under Name display for married women in Account & Preferences. Both names are always saved, and you can search for a person by either one.

The People list shows both surnames when a woman has a married name and a birth name: it leads with the married surname and adds "née ..." (born as) with the birth name underneath, exactly as the profile page heading does. That wording is fixed rather than following your setting above, because "née" means "born as" and can only ever introduce a birth name. Your setting controls the order people are sorted in, and it drives the single name shown on family tree cards. When only one surname is recorded, or the two are the same, nothing is added.

Other names

A person often appears under more than one name across their records: a Yiddish or Hebrew name alongside a civil one, a name anglicised on arrival, a religious name, a nickname the family actually used. The profile page shows these in an "Other names" card in the right-hand column, next to Known Facts, and you can add or edit them under "Other names" in the profile editor.

Each entry carries a type, so the card records not just what the person was called but in what capacity: also known as, married name, name at birth, immigrant name, or professional name. These come in automatically when a GEDCOM file provides them, and they go back out again when you export, so nothing is lost by moving your tree between apps.

The maiden and married surnames described above are handled separately and do not need an entry here. Living people who are redacted from an export do not have their other names included, since an alternative name is exactly the kind of detail redaction exists to withhold.

Add a person by hand

Most people are created automatically when you confirm a record. When you want someone a record did not create, use the + button to add a person by hand. You can enter their name, gender, dates, and places.

The person profile page

Click any person to open their profile page. It pulls together everything KleioBase knows about them:

• A header with their name, lifespan, gender, and record count.
• The records linked to that person. Click a record to open it in the workspace.
• Their notes.
• Known Facts gathered from their records, such as occupation, religion, burial place, and cause of death. A fact can also carry other wordings it was recorded under, shown as "also recorded as ...". Add or remove those on the Also row of each fact under Edit, then Facts. See Finding & Merging Duplicates for how a duplicate-fact conflict fills them in for you.
• Family Connections: spouses, parents, children, siblings, and associates such as witnesses. Each connection is clickable, so you can move through the tree.
• Any potential duplicate matches for that person.
• An Expected records panel, when there are gaps worth searching. See below.
• A personal timeline of their dated events. See below for how to read it.

From the profile page you can link an existing person as a relative, edit a spouse relationship's status, and unlink connections that are wrong.

To edit a person's details, use Edit profile. While editing, Save keeps you on the edit screen so you can keep working, and Save & close returns to the profile when you are done.

To merge a duplicate person into this one, see Finding & Merging Duplicates. The merge screen lists every field the two profiles can carry - name, dates, places, occupation, religion, burial, christening, cause of death, notes, and more - plus every repeatable fact and timeline event from both profiles as its own row, so you decide exactly what carries across to the profile you keep rather than one side quietly winning by default.

Adding an event to a person

Open a person, choose Edit, then Events, then Add. Every event has:

• Event type - the kind of event. Every event type in the GEDCOM standard is available, including Immigration, Emigration, Residence, Graduation, Naturalization, Baptism, Bar Mitzvah, Adoption, Retirement, Probate and Cremation. Pick Event when nothing fits and describe it yourself.
• Place - where it happened. Adding a place lets the timeline show what was happening in that country at the time.
• Date - required, and can be exact, approximate, or a range.
• Description - optional. Leave it blank and the event reads as its type, for example "Emigration".

Birth, christening, death and burial

These four appear in the Events list too, and are shared with the Identity section: edit one and the other updates, delete the row and the identity fields clear. Christening and burial dates can only be set here.

Because they are shared, the first Birth row is the person's birth. If you add a second Birth (or a second death, christening or burial), KleioBase keeps it rather than discarding your second source, and raises a Same Life Event Recorded Twice conflict so you can decide which one is right. See Conflicts below.

Dates that are not plain Gregorian dates

A date field holds far more than a day, month and year. It can say "about 1890", "before 1901" or "from 1903 to 1907"; it can hold a date in the Hebrew, Julian or French Republican calendar, converting between them on request; and it can hold a date your record only states in words. See Dates and Calendars for all of it.

Living or deceased

Every profile has a Status: Unknown, Living, or Deceased. You can set it from Edit profile or from the full edit page's Identity section.

• Unknown is the default, and what every profile starts as. It does not assert anything about whether the person is alive.
• Deceased records that a person has died, even when you do not know when or where. A profile marked Deceased with no death date shows a lifespan like "b. 1890 · d. unknown" rather than looking like an unfinished record.
• Living hides the death date, death place, burial place, and cause of death, and stops the rest of the app from treating a missing death as a research gap for that person. Their lifespan then shows only the birth half, for example "b. 1990". On the full edit page, the Events section also stops offering Death and Burial rows while a person is marked Living.

Marking someone Living does not delete any death data already on their profile. It stays recorded but hidden, and if the profile already has death data when you switch to Living, a note tells you what is being hidden. Switch back to Deceased and everything reappears exactly as it was.

If death information later turns up for someone marked Living, KleioBase changes their status to Deceased automatically and sends you a notification. Recorded evidence always outranks the flag. This happens when you apply a record's suggested changes to the profile, when the Research Companion updates the profile for you, and when a merge brings in death information the surviving profile did not already have. Merging on its own never changes the status: only death information that is genuinely new to that profile does, so death data you chose to keep hidden behind a Living status stays hidden.

Undoing a merge puts the status back the way it was. If a merge changed someone from Living to Deceased, undoing it returns them to Living along with the death information the merge brought in.

Sharing a profile

A share link is a public, read-only page showing one person's biography. Anyone with the link can open it, no KleioBase account needed.

A profile needs a biography before you can share it. Open the profile and ask Kleio, the Research Companion, to write one - once it's ready, the Share button on the biography opens the share modal.

Creating and managing a link

• Expiry - choose how long the link stays valid, from a few days up to never expiring.
• Password - add a password so only people you give it to can open the link. Optional unless the person is marked Living (see below).
• Copy - copies the link to your clipboard.
• Regenerate - replaces the current link with a new one. The old link stops working immediately, so use this if a link got shared further than you intended.
• Revoke - takes the link down entirely. You can create a new one anytime.

Sharing a living person

If the profile is marked Living, you must confirm you have that person's consent to publish their profile - or their guardian's consent, if they are a minor - and the link must have a password. Both are required before the link can be created.

If a profile might be living - no recorded death, and born within the last 100 years, or with no known birth year - you only need to confirm that the person is deceased or that you have their consent to share their information publicly. A password is optional in this case.

If a profile is marked Deceased, or KleioBase is confident they are not living based on their birth year, no confirmation is needed to create the link.

Marking a profile as Living after you've already shared it takes the link down: the page stops loading for anyone who has the URL, even if the link has not expired. Add the consent confirmation and a password and create a new link to share it again.

The person timeline

Every profile has a timeline: a visual lane laying out that person's dated events in order, from births and deaths to marriages, immigration, census appearances, military service, and other events pulled from their records. Each event shows the person's age at the time, so you can see at a glance how old they were for anything that happened to them.

The timeline also marks the gaps in what you know:

• Gap markers flag any stretch of 20 years or more with no recorded event, and suggest searching census, parish, or civil records for that period.
• Missing-census markers show a census year the person should appear in, based on where and when they lived, but currently does not.
• Conflict badges appear on events affected by a data-quality problem, such as a death dated before a birth. Click one to go straight to the fix.

Behind the events, a band of historical eras and world events runs along the same axis, scoped to where and when the person actually lived, so you can place their life against the wider history around them. A Historical context toggle above the timeline turns those bands on and off. They start off, so turn them on when you want to read a life against the history around it.

Only events that show where someone lived set that scope: birth, death, residence, census, immigration and naturalization. An emigration is used for its date but not its place, because the place on an emigration is usually the port someone sailed from rather than a home - a family leaving Ukraine often departed from Hamburg or Trieste, and that should not fill their timeline with German or Italian history. Marriages, occupations and other events never set the scope. The same rule applies to the tree-wide timeline.

For the scope to work, write places with their country ("Lviv, Ukraine" rather than "Lviv"). A place with no country cannot be matched to a country's history.

Getting more accurate historical context

Historical events are matched on place and time, but some are also matched on who the person was. A small number of entries in the historical library are scoped to a specific religion, nationality, or caste - for example, an event about the Holocaust only appears for an ancestor recorded as Jewish or Romani, and an event about the Chinese Exclusion Act era only appears for an ancestor recorded as Chinese.

To get this context, fill in Religion, Nationality, or Caste on a person's profile: open the person, choose Edit, then Facts, and add the relevant fact. If a person has none of these recorded, KleioBase looks for a value on their nearest recorded ancestor or, failing that, a spouse, so descendants of one documented ancestor still see relevant context without you having to enter it on every person individually. A person's own recorded value always takes priority over one filled in this way.

A Research overlay toggle, on by default, puts that person's open research findings onto the timeline alongside their confirmed events. Turn it off when you want only the events you have evidence for. Neither toggle is remembered between visits - every profile opens on the same view.

Everything on the timeline is clickable: an event opens the record it came from, and a gap or conflict marker opens the relevant fix.

Expected records

The Expected records panel on a person's profile page lists specific records this person should appear in, based on where and when they lived, that are not linked to them yet. Each row is a concrete search target, not a vague suggestion - for example "1900 United States census - Ohio" alongside the person's approximate age at the time.

Targets are worked out automatically from what KleioBase already knows about the person: their places, their birth and death years, and their gender. A person whose places resolve to a country KleioBase tracks (United States, England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, or German Empire) gets a target for each census year within their lifetime that has no linked census record. Someone of eligible age and place during a matching conflict - the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, or the Commonwealth equivalents - gets targets for draft registration, service records, pension files, medal rolls, and enlistment records. Missing birth, marriage, death, and burial records implied by what is already known about the person show up too.

Some record series barely survived. The 1890 United States federal census was almost entirely destroyed in a 1921 fire, so it still appears as a target but is labeled "fragments only" and shown in a muted color. It is left out of the count in the rolled-up Research Notes on your dashboard and in Insights, so a note never sends you looking for a census that mostly does not exist.

Dismiss a target with the X next to it once you have ruled it out. Dismissing is per person and permanent - it will not come back for that person even after your data changes. As you confirm more records, targets that are now satisfied drop off the list on their own. There is nothing to look up by hand, and Expected records costs no AI credits to run.

Expected records is part of research gap detection, so it is available on the Researcher plan and above. See Plans & Billing for what each plan includes.

Recording a search that found nothing

Searching a register and finding nothing is a real result, and worth recording so a gap reads "I looked here and it is not there" rather than "I have not looked yet". Add one under Negative evidence in the profile editor: the kind of record you looked for, the period your search covered, and what you actually searched.

Dated entries appear on the person's timeline under the research overlay, struck through, in the chronological place that explains the gap. They also quiet the Expected records prompt for that event, and they travel with your tree on export.

See Negative Evidence for the full guide.

Records and profiles: what your edits change

Records and profiles are two different things on purpose, and it is normal for them to show different values.

A record is a fixed snapshot of one document: it should always say exactly what that document said, even if the information later turns out to be incomplete or you learn something more accurate elsewhere. A person profile is your living conclusion about someone, built from all of their records and anything you add by hand. The profile is the up-to-date source of truth for who that person was.

When you confirm a record, its values are copied into the relevant person profiles once. After that, the record and the profiles are independent:

• Editing a profile (for example, filling in a birth date or correcting a place) updates only that person. It does not change the fields or wording stored on the underlying records.
• Editing a record in the workspace updates only that record. It does not rewrite the profiles already built from it.

This separation is deliberate. A record is evidence from a moment in time, so it stays faithful to its document, while the profile is where you reconcile everything you know. Keeping them apart also means that when two records disagree (say, a census age that does not match a marriage record), you can still see exactly what each document said rather than having one quietly overwrite the other. That disagreement is often the most useful clue in your research.

So if you fill out a person more completely and notice the linked record's fields did not change, that is expected: the record keeps the document's account, and the profile holds your reconciled picture.

Families and "connected"

Relationships in your tree come from two places: the confirmed records themselves, and the links you add by hand on a profile page.

A profile is "connected" when it can be reached from your home person through family and marriage links. A "disconnected" profile is a real person who simply is not linked into your main tree yet. To connect them, open their profile and link them to a relative.

Some people only ever appear in a supporting role - a witness, an officiant, a godparent, a midwife. KleioBase groups these as "associates" and keeps them out of your disconnected count, since they are not people you would expect to link into your own family tree. You can still find them anytime with the "associates" filter on the People tab.

You set your home person in settings. See Getting Started for how to choose it and why it matters.

Family Tree

The Family Tree page draws your family as an interactive chart, built from the families in your confirmed records and the relationships you add by hand. Open it from the Family Tree item in the sidebar. Starting from your home person, you can pan and zoom the chart, click a card to see a person's relatives and timeline, focus the tree on anyone to explore their branch, and read the colors and connector lines that encode gender and relationship type. The tree also highlights your research gaps, lets you add a relative straight from the canvas, and exports to PNG, SVG, or print.

The tree has its own full guide: see Family Tree for navigation, the side panel, the legend, research gaps, adding relatives, and exporting.

Records

The Records tab lists every record you have, as a grid or a list.

1. Search by file name or title.
2. Filter by record type and by status.
3. Click a record to open it in the workspace, where you see the image alongside the transcription and the narrative. Click Edit to correct anything, including rewording the narrative.

To rename or print a record, right-click its card.

Deleting a record here moves it to Trash. It does not delete the people that record created. You will see a note about which profiles would be left with no records, but those profiles stay in your tree.

Places

The Places tab is an interactive map of the places pulled from your records, such as birth, marriage, and death places.

• Click a pin to see the people and events tied to that place.
• Filter the map by record type to focus on one kind of event.

A place may not appear on the map if it could not be located. If you expected a place and do not see it, check that the place name on the underlying records is specific enough to be found.

Timeline

The Timeline tab lays out every dated event across your whole tree on one interactive chart, organized into lanes.

Family lines

Each lane is a family line: a group of people connected by blood who share a surname. When someone marries into a line, they stay in their own birth line rather than switching to their spouse's, so you can follow each blood line across generations without it splitting every time someone marries in.

Zoom, scroll, and history

Zoom continuously from a view of centuries down to individual months, so you can see the overall shape of your tree at a glance or drill into a single decade of one family line. The same historical era bands used on the person timeline run across the chart, scoped to your tree as a whole, so you can see your family's events against the wider history around them. As on the person timeline, a few of these events are also matched on who the person was - see Getting more accurate historical context above.

Filter and compare

Use the filters to show or hide event types, turn individual family lines on or off, and toggle the historical layer. To compare two lines directly, turn on comparison mode and pick exactly two family lines: they overlay on the same axis so you can see where their timespans overlap.

Click any event to open the person's profile or the record it came from.

Conflicts

The Conflicts tab runs automatic data-quality checks and flags things that cannot be right. Examples include:

• A death dated before a birth.
• A marriage dated before someone was born.
• A parent who is too young to have a child.
• Siblings born too close together.
• The same life event recorded twice, such as two different birth dates for one person.
• A family fact, such as a marriage date or place, that disagrees with the record it came from.

Each conflict comes with a short explanation and how to fix it. Usually the fix is to open the profile and correct a date, or to choose which parent is the biological one.

A conflict clears itself once you fix the underlying data, so you do not need to dismiss it manually. Work through the list and the flags disappear as your data gets cleaner.

Trash

Deleting a record or a profile is a soft delete. It goes to the Trash tab, not gone for good.

• Restore brings an item back. Restoring a profile also restores the records that were deleted with it.
• Delete forever is permanent and cannot be undone.
• Anything you leave in Trash is permanently deleted 30 days after you moved it there, including the uploaded image for a record and any photo on a profile.

Because deleting a record never deletes the people it created, you can safely remove a record without losing the profiles it built. The Trash tab is your safety net for anything you remove from People or Records.

Tree Health Score

Your dashboard shows a Tree Health Score: a single number from 0 to 100 that sums up how complete, accurate, and connected your tree currently is. It recalculates automatically as your data changes, so it always reflects where your tree stands right now.

The three pillars

The score is built from three pillars, each shown as its own bar under the overall number:

• Completeness - how many of the core facts (name, birth date, birth place, and death details when applicable) are filled in across your people.
• Consistency - how many data-quality conflicts your tree has, such as a death dated before a birth. Fewer conflicts means a higher score. See Conflicts above for how those are found and fixed.
• Connectedness - how much of your tree is linked back to your home person, the same connection rate described earlier in this guide under "Families and connected."

The overall score combines these three pillars into one number, and a band label - Fair, Good, Very Good, or Excellent - gives you a quick read on where you stand.

The percentile

Once enough researchers on KleioBase have a stored score, your dashboard also shows a line like "Your tree is better than 62% of researchers." This percentile compares your score against everyone else's on the platform, but it only ever shows you an anonymous aggregate number - never any other user's tree, name, or details. If you don't see a percentile yet, it just means not enough other researchers have a score stored to make the comparison meaningful.

Achievements

Below the score, an Achievements section on your dashboard tracks badges you earn automatically as your research grows - your first upload, first person, first Research Companion conversation, and the first time you share a person's story with someone, plus milestones for the number of records and people in your tree, how many generations back you have documented, how many countries and record types your records span, and reaching each Tree Health Score band. Earned badges are highlighted; the rest stay visible but dimmed so you can see what is still ahead. There is nothing to claim or configure - a badge unlocks the moment you meet its criteria.

Quick Wins

The Insights page includes a Quick Wins section that turns your health score into concrete next steps: specific things you can fix, like filling in missing facts or connecting disconnected people into your tree, ordered by how much fixing them would improve your score. Quick Wins draws on the same research-gap detection used elsewhere in Insights, so it is available on the Researcher plan and above. See Plans & Billing for what each plan includes.

Where to go next

• New to KleioBase? Start with Getting Started.
• Need to add more data? See Uploading Records and the /upload workspace.
• Seeing the same person twice? See Finding & Merging Duplicates.
• Wrestling with an approximate date, or one in another calendar? See Dates and Calendars.
• Searched a register and found nothing? Record it. See Negative Evidence.
• Want answers across all of this data? Ask the Research Companion.