People, firms, places, acts

Most people who turn up in a history never get a chapter of their own. A witness signs a marriage act, a bookkeeper turns up only as his initials, a band appears on one venue programme. Each was recorded, even if the story never stops for them. This index puts those records together under four headings: people, firms, places and musical acts. Its table is generated from the entity records, so its count follows the records rather than this prose. Relationships are left out, because a separate relationship table could expose details that the anonymised person rows are meant to withhold.

The split is about publication status, whatever a person's importance. A person marked as living and private shrinks to a generic placeholder label ("a living person, private"), with no name, date, place, address, relationship or other identifying detail. Living people named in the public-role register appear only in the capacity their public sources support. A missing life-status field does not prove that someone is dead. The publication gate, and no assumption made here, decides what the generated table reveals.

The list is complete, and it has rough edges. Some people here are known only by their initials, because that is all a directory or a jubilee notice ever printed of them. No birth, marriage or death record joins them to the rest of a name. A handful of identities rest on a single reading of a single clause, a witness named once in a crowded hand. These are marked as awaiting a second, independent reading before they count as settled. None of that is hidden: a thin entry is shown as thin and never rounded up into a certainty the record does not hold.

Because the list comes straight from the records the rest of the site is built on, it cannot quietly fall behind them. Most of those records look like this one. It is a household card naming a whole family in one clerk's hand, with the head entered on the first line as the painter's father, a cabinet-maker born in Vlaardingen in 1852: