Research standards

Every surname runs through a sixteen-step research chain — normalisation, etymology, origins, the ground the name points to, earliest records, timeline, migration, distribution and rarity, spelling variants, cousin forms abroad, notable bearers, heraldry claims, a records roadmap, documented statistics, share copy, and a final assembly pass that validates everything before you see it. No report is generated in a single pass, and the final validation step can reject a report outright.

Each step's findings must arrive as structured, cited claims. Our rendering system is built so that an uncited claim cannot physically appear in a report — it is rejected before the page is made, not edited afterwards.

Every finding in an Ancesta report is tagged, visibly, with one of four states:

• Confident. At least two independent sources agree. Nothing is marked confident on a single citation, however authoritative it looks.
• Probable. Supported by evidence, but the evidence is single-sourced, thin, or indirect — and the report tells you which.
• Contested. Sources genuinely disagree. We print the competing readings side by side, with the sources for each, rather than quietly choosing the prettier story.
• Quiet. The record has nothing defensible to say. The report shows a designed gap that states what wasn't found and, where possible, what kind of surviving document would resolve it. We do not estimate across gaps.

We prefer primary and archival material — parish registers, tax rolls, census records, dictionaries of surnames, peer-reviewed onomastics — over aggregator sites, and every report lists its full sources in a dedicated section. Where modern distribution figures are statistical estimates, they are labelled as estimates.

Distribution figures are the easiest place in this field to mislead, so we publish both of the numbers people mean when they say “where the name is most common”, and never mix them:

• Share of all bearers. Of everyone in the world documented as carrying the name, the proportion living in that country. This is the figure that ranks the list, most to least, and it is comparable across the list because every row is a share of the same global total.
• Share of local people. Of everyone living in that country, the proportion who carry the name. A different denominator and a much smaller number — a name can hold a small share of its bearers in a country where it is extraordinarily common locally. The report prints both percentages side by side, with the times-denser-than-average ratio beneath, rather than picking whichever sounds more impressive.

Both columns are always labelled with their denominator, so the two percentages can never be read as the same measure. Where a source reports only one of the two, we derive the other from published population figures and the name's own bearer total, and leave it blank rather than guess when we cannot.

Research for a surname is re-run whenever it is more than seven days old — not a full rebuild, but a gap-filling pass that looks for newly available sources and revisits anything previously marked quiet. When that pass changes a finding, every existing report for that surname is updated too, with the change shown. You are not left holding the older reading because someone else bought the name after you.

Not personal genealogy. We research the documented history of the name, not your line of descent. Sharing a surname with anyone — famous or otherwise — is not evidence of relation. We never ask about living relatives and never touch DNA.

Not a single tidy origin story. Many surnames arose independently in more than one place. Where that's true, your report says so and documents each origin, marked with its own confidence state.

A note on heraldry. Coats of arms were historically granted to individuals and their direct heirs — there is no such thing as a coat of arms belonging to a surname, and products selling “your family crest” are selling a misunderstanding. Where Ancesta shows arms at all, they are presented as arms historically associated with individual bearers of the name, with the bearer and source identified, and never as arms you are entitled to.

If a completed report cannot support at least three confident sections, we don't quietly ship it — the report is flagged, you're offered a refund under our Refund Policy, and the honest partial findings are yours either way. If new sources later change a finding, your report is updated transparently, with the change shown, never silently rewritten.

If you believe a finding in your report is wrong, email history@ancesta.co with the report number and the source you believe contradicts it. Corrections that survive our two-source rule are made, credited to the record, and rolled into the research for every future reader of that surname. Being corrected by the record is the system working.