About the archive

What is Kinlight?

An interactive archive of real genealogies. Five volumes are on the shelf: the British royal line from Alfred the Great to today, the Roman emperors, the Byzantine emperors, the House of Habsburg, and — on the myth & saga shelf — the Greek gods from Chaos to the Olympians.

Everything runs in your browser. There is nothing to sign up for, no account, and no personal detail is ever asked of you. Each person and each ruling house also has a plain page of their own, readable without any of the moving parts.

Where do the facts come from?

The British royal line is built from the britroyals.com monarch pages, cross-checked against the public record. The Roman, Byzantine and Habsburg volumes are built from Wikipedia’s family-tree and ruler-list articles — the Family tree of Roman emperors, the Family tree of Byzantine emperors and List of Byzantine emperors, and the Habsburg family tree, House of Habsburg and List of rulers of Austria. The Olympians follow Hesiod’s Theogony and the classical canon.

Only extracted facts ship — names, dates, marriages, children, reigns. The biographies you read are composed here from those facts, so no source prose is reproduced. Portraits are served from Wikimedia Commons, remain under their own licences, and are credited in each person’s record.

How does a house or dynasty decide who belongs to it?

Membership comes from Wikidata’s “family” property (P53) — public, machine-readable, CC0 — resolved from the Wikipedia article each person already links to. It is the source’s judgement, not ours.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The coloured bracket beside the tree marks the generations a house REIGNED across, which is not the same as the people it was made of. Reading the Tudors off those rows would have excluded Henry VII — the first Tudor king, who stands a generation above the bracket — and swept in Anne Boleyn, Philip II of Spain and Mary Queen of Scots, who each belonged to houses of their own. Wikidata gets it right: the House of Tudor is ten people, and the in-laws of other houses are correctly left out.

A few brackets are not houses at all. The Habsburg branches slice one very long house into eras, so those pages show that house’s members between their own rows. Rome’s Third Century collects several short-lived dynasties standing in the same decades. Those pages say so, and they never borrow the dates, founder or description of any one family as if it were their own.

Myth is the exception: no family records exist for the gods, so the Olympian tiers are grouped by generation, and each of those four pages states it outright rather than letting the grouping pass for a bloodline.

Why does this person belong to no house?

Because the source records none for them. Wikidata files a family for most but not all of the people here — roughly four in five in the British and Habsburg volumes, closer to two in three among the Byzantines, and none at all for the gods.

Where there is no record, the archive leaves it blank. It would be easy to guess from the row someone stands in, and it would often be wrong: a queen consort standing among Tudors was usually not a Tudor. A gap in the source is shown as a gap.

Why is someone missing, or why does a line stop?

Each volume follows one line of descent rather than every branch of every family. A person is here if they stand on that line or married into it. The British volume holds 264 people across 40 generations, the Byzantine 243 across 41, the Habsburg 149 across 25, the Roman 121 across 22, and the Olympians 152 across 9.

So a real historical figure can be absent simply because their branch runs away from the line this volume follows. Where the record itself is lost — an unrecorded mother, a child who left no trace — the archive says so on the person’s page instead of quietly closing the gap.

How are living people handled?

A living person’s record can be held back to their initials, their birth decade and their place in the family — nothing more. Three living Habsburgs are kept that way.

The living British royals are not: they are public figures whose names, dates and families are already matters of public record, so their entries read like any other. On the myth & saga shelf the same flag means something else entirely — there it marks a god as immortal, and the archive words it that way rather than calling them living.

Why do the gods have no dates?

Because myth has no chronology, and inventing one would be the only way to fill the column. The Olympians volume carries no birth or death years at all, and every part of the archive that would normally print a year simply prints nothing there.

The ancient sources also disagree with each other. Where they do, one tradition is drawn as the tree and the rival versions are told in the biography, so the disagreement stays visible instead of being settled by us.

Can I reuse the data?

The datasets are served as plain JSON, one set per volume: a core file of people, unions and generations, and a houses file of memberships and house facts. They sit under /data/<volume>/core.json and /data/<volume>/houses.json, and there is no key or rate limit.

The underlying historical facts belong to everyone. The design, code and written prose are © Kinlight — links and brief quotations are welcome with attribution. Portraits are not ours to license: they belong to their Wikimedia Commons contributors under their own terms. House memberships and house facts come from Wikidata under CC0.

How do I read the tree?

Drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom, and click the small medallion on a couple’s line to unfold the generation beneath them. Selecting anyone opens their record, and every relative named in it is a link you can follow.

The coloured bracket down the side of the page marks a house, and so does its name in the strip along the foot — click either to open that house and light its people while the rest of the tree falls back. To measure the distance between two people, select one, choose “trace kinship”, then select the other. Press ? at any time for the full legend.

What if something is wrong?

Tell us — corrections are welcome, and the sources are named on every volume so a claim can be checked. The archive makes no warranty of accuracy or completeness: verify before you rely on anything here, particularly for the early medieval generations, where the record itself is thin and dates are approximations.