The Faust Legacy Archive
Editorial Policy
The standards by which entries in this archive are prepared, classified, revised, and corrected.
- 01
To preserve family history
The first duty of the archive is to keep what has survived: records, biographies, correspondence, portraits, register entries, and the accounts the family has carried between generations. Material is retained even when it is fragmentary, inconvenient, or difficult to place.
- 02
To distinguish primary material from reconstruction
Documents held in hand are not presented on the same footing as accounts assembled from context. Each entry carries a record classification so that a reader can tell a primary record from a transcription, a translation, a reconstruction, or family tradition.
- 03
To identify uncertainty where possible
Approximate dates are marked as estimates, contested attributions are noted, and gaps are described rather than smoothed over. Where the archive does not know, it says that it does not know.
- 04
To correct information when better records appear
Entries are revised as documents are recovered, translated, or authenticated, and as family members supply records held privately. A correction is treated as ordinary archival work, not as an embarrassment.
- 05
To preserve original wording while providing readable transcriptions
Where an original survives, its wording is respected. Transcriptions regularise spelling, abbreviation, and layout for legibility, and the fact of that regularisation is recorded alongside the entry.
- 06
To document translations and editorial changes
German and other continental material appears in English translation, with the language of the original and the nature of the translation recorded. Editorial changes — omissions, reconstructions of damaged passages, modernised names — are noted rather than made silently.
On outside authority
The archive does not cite institutions, registries, publications, or scholars that have not supplied material to it, and does not represent its reconstructions as independently verified. Where the evidence is incomplete, the entry is classified accordingly.