Family research

POST /v1/research/family takes 1 to 6 people and the relations you believe connect them. Each person becomes a research job with the budget split evenly between them. When the jobs finish, every claimed relation comes back proven, with the record and quote that proves it, or unproven, with the reason. Agents call it as the research_family tool.

Start a family

curl https://api.lineage.rexstjohn.com/v1/research/family \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LINEAGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "people": [
      {"label": "ichabod", "name": "Ichabod Murray", "birth": {"year": 1755}, "death": {"year": 1831}, "places": ["Sharon, Connecticut", "Fairfield, Herkimer County, New York"]},
      {"label": "reuben", "name": "Reuben Murray", "birth": {"year": 1743}, "death": {"year": 1810}}
    ],
    "relations": [{"from": "ichabod", "to": "reuben", "relation": "sibling"}]
  }'

• people: each with a label (used in relations), a name, and birth, death and places as far as they are known. relatives on a person (such as brother or wife) that name another person in the set become claimed relations too.
• relations: from, to and relation, which is sibling, spouse, parent or child.
• depth: deep by default. budget_credits: the cap for the whole family. Left out, it is 400 for deep and 80 for quick. The deep default is a proposal that has not been confirmed and may change.
• The response is 202 with a fam_ id. Poll GET /v1/research/family/{id} until status is completed or completed_with_failures. GET /v1/research/family/{id}/gedcom exports every member with the proven links, service events as _MILT, and an age-derived birth as BET 1754 AND 1755.

GEDCOM and _MILT

Exports are GEDCOM 7.0 unless you add version=5.5.1. _MILT is a Lineage extension: one military service event on an INDI, from a record of service, a pension file, a muster or pay roll or a state roster. TYPE holds the record's title, DATE and PLAC the record's date and place, and SOUR (with PAGE) the record it came from. In a 7.0 file HEAD.SCHMA declares it as TAG _MILT https://api.lineage.rexstjohn.com/docs/family-research#_MILT, the address of this section.

What proves a relation

• A deposition or pension declaration in which one names the other, such as "my brother Daniel Murray".
• A will that names them.
• A record that states the relation, with the kin word in its quote.
• The same two parents, by name, in both members' records.
• Never a shared surname. Two men named Murray on one roll are two leads, not brothers.

Living people

Every person goes through the living-person gate before anything runs. A person with no birth or death date counts as possibly alive, and then nobody in the family is researched: the answer is 422 living_person_blocked with person set to that label, and nothing is charged. Add a birth or death year for each person (a decade is enough) and send it again.

Revolutionary War veterans

For anyone born 1715 to 1768 who lived in the thirteen states, Vermont, Maine, Kentucky or Tennessee, the source plan opens the Revolutionary War pack: NARA pension files (M804), compiled service records (M881 and M246), the state roster, pension lists, DAR and SAR, graves and the county history. A compiled tree or a lineage-society file makes service possible, not evidenced. Paid sites such as Fold3 come back as leads with a link, never fetched. Images from Wikimedia Commons or the Library of Congress carry their license and are captioned context, not a portrait.

The template examples/revolutionary-war-family in the repo runs this for the Murray brothers and writes a cited dossier.