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Levantine Lives

Ottoman Holy Land Christian Communities Project

Levantine Lives

A Historical Atlas of Christian Communities in the Ottoman Holy Land, 1500-1800

Thomas Issa · Founder and Research Infrastructure Director

The programme

The programme reconstructs, from primary sources, the people, families and links of the Christian communities of the Ottoman Holy Land. It brings parish registers and judicial collections into a single base so they can be read against each other rather than in isolation: this person-level cross-reading is work in progress, and the Limits page publishes its exact state.

The platform is not a family tree: it is a documentary atlas, where every statement can be traced back to the record that establishes it.

Data governance

The data lives in a working database kept away from the site. The site publishes a dated snapshot of it, identified by a hash shown in the footer: two visitors citing the same hash cite exactly the same state.

Identity matches are examined in batches and validated before publication. No automatic merge is applied, either by the site or by any statistical process.

Long-term availability

Published data is openly licensed, which allows its preservation and reuse independently of the platform. A frozen, citable release deposited in an academic archive with a persistent identifier is in preparation: until it is deposited, the Cite the database page refers to the snapshot being served and says so plainly.

Access

Access is complete and requires no account. The site does not try to retain its visitors: it tries to make sure they leave with a citable reference.

Documentary sources

24 documentary sources

Rights and licences

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · MIT

Tramontana (University of Warwick) (408 records, 1669-1700, Bethlehem).

Lives connected. Sources revealed.