Estate papers, hereditary archives — with the family as a first-class creator.
An eighth catalog module dedicated to families as a creator type, sitting alongside People and Organizations. The agent record international standards have always reserved for kinship groups — done properly, with member links, hereditary titles, and EAC-CPF export.
- Member relations
- Linked to People
- Export
- EAC-CPF family
- Authority dedupe
- VIAF · LCNAF · Wikidata
The record international standards already expect.
EAC-CPF reserves three agent types — person, corporateBody, and family. Most catalog systems implement the first two and shoehorn the third into either Person (a single representative) or Organization (which it isn't). Archively gives families their own record type, with the fields the standard expects: hereditary title, member links, earliest and latest dates, place of origin.
- Hereditary title maps cleanly to localDescriptions/localType="title"
- Earliest and latest dates handle pre-civil-registration timelines
- Place of origin plus associated places kept distinct, not lumped
Members are real Person records.
A family's members are People — not strings on a card. Each membership carries the person's role inside the family, plus an optional date range when the membership is bounded. Promoting an unresolved entity into a member, or recording that a person joined the family on marriage, is one click each.
- Add members from the existing People authority file
- Per-member role and date range (born, married in, adopted)
- Members surface as EAC-CPF cpfRelation cpfRelationType="family"
Family fonds, family business, related families.
The records that hang off a family in practice — the fonds described as their papers, the business they founded, the allied family they married into — are all first-class links on the record. No invented join tables; the catalog ships with them.
- Related Fonds — the family's papers as a typed link, not a freetext note
- Related Organizations — for the family business or foundation
- Related Families — allied, collateral, merged, succeeded by
- Subjects + Locations + Files — same as the other agent records
Authority dedupe and EAC-CPF export.
Pasting a VIAF cluster id, ISNI, LCNAF naco, or Wikidata QID resolves to the canonical record and returns the existing family if you already have one — so the same family in two collections is never two records. Export emits EAC-CPF with entityType="family" — every cpfRelation, every localDescription, every existDates daterange in the place the spec expects them.
- Dedupes on VIAF / ISNI / LCNAF / Wikidata at create time
- Falls back to case-insensitive name match when no identifier is supplied
- EAC-CPF entityType="family" — single button, downloads as XML
Ready to see it on your collection?
Load a few records. Run the AI. Review and publish — before lunch.