In the early days of the Internet newsgroup soc.genealogy.medieval, established in 1995, there were many discussions bemoaning the lack of a reliable comprehensive database for the genealogy of notable medieval families. While a number of attempts at such databases existed, their overall reliability was generally very low, often repeating long disproved errors and including mythical pseudohistorical individuals. Around the year 2000, there were numerous discussions in the newsgroup about how a more reliable database might be created. One of the most common suggestions was a cooperative database in which anyone could submit whatever they wanted, to be corrected as needed. My own opinion, which I stated on several occasions during these discussions, is that such an approach would not work, and that some sort of quality control would be needed from the very beginning, because taking a bad database and then trying to remove the errors would involve more effort than starting over from scratch.
After these discussions, I decided to propose an attempt at a limited cooperative database, in order to test an approach which I thought might work, and to illustrate to others the kind of documentation which I considered appropriate for such a database. I chose the ancestry of king Henry II of England as the scope of the database, because his ancestry has enough variety to be interesting (including Anglo-Saxon and Scottish kings as well as quite a few continental royal and noble families, with several different lines to Charlemagne), yet the number of documented ancestors is limited enough (no more than a few hundred) that it might be a reasonable project to attempt. In terms of quality control, I thought that some sort of editorial board type of approach would be good, and I contacted Todd Farmerie, one of the original organizers of soc.genealogy.medieval, to see if he would be willing to serve on an editorial board with me, to which he agreed. The Henry Project was uploaded to my website with one sample page (on Rollo of Normandy) and announced to the newsgroup on 23 July 2001, inviting others to submit pages on other ancestors of Henry II for consideration, with a warning that good documentation was expected if the page was to be accepted and added to the database. In the meantime, I started writing and uploading additional pages, a few at a time, waiting to see if I got any submissions. A few months was enough to end any delusions I might have had that there would be numerous submissions by others (as I received only one outside submission, containing virtually no documentation), and I realized that the Henry Project was mainly going to be a one person project. Because of the lack of outside submissions, Todd's services as an editor were not required, but he frequently provided comments about existing pages. Eventually, Peter Stewart, who had already provided many useful comments and corrections on existing pages, wrote several excellent pages for the French kings. Also, James Hansen, FASG, proofread the pages and provided numerous corrections. Comments and corrections were also occasionally provided by others, mentioned on the individual pages. In a handful of cases, I have also uploaded pages for individuals who were not ancestors of Henry II or who were only conjectural (or falsely attributed) ancestors. This is because when complicated cases come up, the documentation for one individual often spills over into the documentation for closely related individuals, making it hard to discuss one without the other. It has always been my plan to finish the project by uploading pages for the ancestors of Henry II not yet having one, but due to various distractions, most notably the online availability of certain German records which opened the floodgates to the previously untraced ancestry of my paternal grandmother, very little additional work has been done on the Henry Project since about 2012.
The format of the pages was set up to be as close as possible to the "family group sheet" format (with links to other pages), which is so common in Internet genealogy, but with some differences that I felt were necessary to increase the quality of the documentation. First and foremost, each statement was to be documented with primary evidence (usually from edited primary sources in print rather than from the manuscripts themselves), whenever those were available to me, or from well-documented secondary sources (along with their citations of the primary evidence) in cases where the primary evidence was not directly available. The pages sometimes read a bit awkwardly, because citations in the pages written by me were given in brackets after the statements, mostly because the lack of automatic footnote numbering in the html editor I was using made the use of footnotes difficult, but also partly because I hoped that putting the documentation "in the reader's face" might make the readers more likely to read the notes. In addition, because it was often necessary to distinguish between well-documented information, and information that was more uncertain, conjectural, or controversial, most pages were divided into two sections, a main (top) section principally giving information which was certain (or at least probable), and a "Commentary" section discussing less certain situations, and also including any documentation or discussion involving the top section which could not be given briefly. Another feature included in the Commentary section was a discussion of all high-profile errors and false claims of which I was aware, along with the evidence for debunking them. I have hoped that this will at least slow the spread of erroneous accounts.
Working on this project was definitely a learning experience for me. Because of this, I believe that, in general, the more recently written pages are better done than the earlier ones. In many cases, I first had to acquaint myself with the underlying evidence by wading through the scholarly literature. Where scholarly works were consulted, even when the information was well-documented, it was often necessary to work through two or three levels of citations in order to find references to the primary documentation. For this reason, pages on the Henry Project will often give more direct citations to the primary sources than other secondary sources. Although these pages have been generally well received by the genealogical community, some errors undoubtedly remain, and there are certainly places where revisions or updates would be desirable. While the main point of this project was to give expository accounts of the best scholarship on the relevant individuals rather than doing new research, there were two cases in which I thought that the evidence veered far enough from established opinion that submitting a paper for publication was justified. These two articles were published as "The Parentage of Otgiva 'of Luxemburg': An Unsolved Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Problem," TAG 83 (2008): 116-21, and "The Ancestry of Count Conan le Tort of Brittany," TG 24 (2010): 169-88.
June 23, 2020
Stewart Baldwin, FASG