²¹Open Questions and Glossary

The work has raised 32 questions, and this page shows all of them, answered and unanswered alike. Each comes with the best answer the record now allows and, where there is one, the condition that would take it further. The ledger is not a wish-list or a to-do list. It is open so that a reader can see what is known, what is not, and why a closed file is closed.

Every question has a status: 12 are open, 6 are in progress and 14 are resolved. About half also have a desk verdict, a second label that says why a parked line is parked. The next step may be an order at a reading room, a blocked catalogue, material already held, or a source that has run dry. Status and verdict are two separate fields and do not sort neatly into three groups, so the page reads them side by side instead of forcing each question into one bucket. Seventeen records carry a retry gate. In twelve it names an outside, checkable condition that would have to change before it was worth going back, such as an archive digitising a series or an owner placing an order; in the other five it says there is none. The remaining fifteen have no such field, and their silence should not be read as a missing gate. A route marked closed stays closed until its governed retry condition is met.

Two kinds of entry are easy to misread, so the ledger keeps them apart. A question can be answered and still leave a loose end. When a founder's death is settled and his record held, but one offline certificate still waits to be ordered, the question is answered with a residual; it is not open. And a search run properly, through a named source for named years, that finds nothing is a result in its own right. The digitised press names no factory-nuisance notice for the corner¹, and the project keeps that result without apology.

One entry shows how far work at the desk can go. Asked what the building's later permits held, the project traced the chain down to 1987 without ordering a thing, because the answer was written on the backs of two building cards it already had; only the two files of 2002 came from an online index instead of the cards².

Every question, with its status, its best answer and any retry gate, appears in the research ledger.

Much of what this site can say rests on a handful of Dutch trade and archive words that do not translate cleanly. The word itself is part of the record: a job title as an advertisement printed it, a record type as the archive named it. Where the word is the evidence, it stays in Dutch and is glossed once, in the sense the sources give it and not a dictionary's. A meubelmaker is a cabinet-maker, a maker of furniture and not a carpenter. A stoffeerder is an upholsterer. An adresboek is the yearly street-by-street address book, the backbone of the occupancy record. A gezinskaart is the household card of the population register, one per family, listing every address the family moved through. The words appear on printed pages like this one.

The glossary gives the full list, from the trades that built the works to the tolerated status under which a squat could carry on, each term in the sense its own sources give it. Here the archive ends. How it was all made, and which work was done by hand and which by machine, is the subject of the Methodology, which begins on the next page.