A private archive

The Trevorrow family

Seven generations, from the tin mines of St Just in Penwith to the gold mines of Grass Valley, California. Forty one people, a hundred and one things they did, and the photographs that survive.

This is a demonstration, so the passphrase is printed here: . On the real archive it would be whatever you choose, and it would not be printed anywhere.

The passphrase here is checked in your browser, which keeps out anyone who finds the address but not anyone who opens the developer tools. The built version checks it at the edge and sets a signed cookie, so the pages are never sent to a browser that has not passed. That is a real difference and it is worth saying out loud rather than implying.

Wikimedia Commons, CC0
The Trevorrow family
St Just in Penwith, and Grass Valley

Places

24 places, and the shape of them is the story. 14 are in England, nearly all within a few miles of St Just in Penwith, where this family mined tin. 5 are in the United States, around Grass Valley in California, where the same family mined gold. The rest are single points left by the ones who went further: Johannesburg, Fremantle, Kalgoorlie, a trench in France, and a harbour in Chile that survives here as a postmark and nothing else.

No map

0 of the 24 places in this archive carry coordinates, so there is no map on this page. A map would need a latitude and a longitude entered for every one of them by somebody who knows which Sennen and which Nevada City is meant, and it would still have to show that some of these are towns, some are mines, and one is a single house on a street in St Just. Drawn without that, a map is a picture of nowhere.

Who is not here

13 of the 41 people in this archive are living relatives who have not agreed to appear in full, so they are not named on this page. A birth, a death or a marriage that would name one of them is counted at its place instead of listed, and the roll under a moment names only the people who may be named. Counted and not listed, across 8 places: 13 births and 4 marriages. Several of these places hold more of this family than the page shows.

The count beside each country is how many births, deaths, marriages and moments this archive attaches to it. Inside a country the places are ordered by that count rather than alphabetically, so the two towns this family actually lived in come first.

England

14 places. 51 entries, 1845 to 2023.

United States

5 places. 24 entries, 1902 to 2019.

Australia

2 places. 7 entries, 1908 to 2015.

France

1 place. 1 entry, 1917.

South Africa

1 place. 1 entry, 1896.

Chile

1 place. Nothing attached.

  • Valparaiso

    No birth, death, marriage or moment in this archive is attached to Valparaiso. A place recorded and never used is itself a fact about the record, so it stays on the page.

    Named in
    The letter from Fremantle, and the life of Arthur Samuel Trevorrow

An invented family, built to show how this works. The photographs are real public domain archival portraits of real people who are not these people, and each one credits its archive. Freely licensed portrait photography effectively stops around 1946, which is why the earliest generations are rich and the recent ones are empty mounts. On your own archive, those are where your photographs go. What is real and what is not.