About This Volume

Purpose

The Maddox Chronicle is the online form of a family history gathered across a lifetime by Rodney C. Maddox: the descent of the family of Madoc of Scethrog, Wales, through twelve generations in America. It is presented in the manner of a bound family volume because that is how such archives have always best been kept — with care, with ornament in its proper place, and with the record itself always foremost.

The record

The chronicle rests on two documents written by Rodney C. Maddox — Maddox Family History and Maddox Family History Charts. Their contents were transcribed, extracted, and reconciled into a single connected dataset of 639 people; every discrepancy found between the two documents was resolved against the sources and is recorded openly in the ledger of conflicts. All individuals recorded in the American generations of the two source documents: the direct Maddox lineage (generations 1-12 in America), collateral descendants and their spouses, related in-law families with recorded vital data (Robbins, Cheuvront, Conger, Lockhart lines), and American Maddoxes of this line named in the chapter narratives.

A family history is a work of love, not a certified record. Dates and places are given as the compiler recorded them; where the documents disagree with each other or with the stones, the chronicle says so rather than choosing silently.

Privacy

Living members of the family deserve to appear in its story without being exposed by it. Anyone with no recorded death who was born within the last 110 years is treated as living — 77 people at present. For them the chronicle publishes a name, a year of birth, and a place in the family, and withholds exact dates, places, biographical notes, and manuscript passages. They appear with a generic portrait, and their descent stays traceable. If you are a member of the family and would like your entry corrected, completed, or further restricted, say so here and it will be done.

Adding to the record

A family history is never finished, and this one was gathered by one man who could not have known everything. Corrections, missing people, photographs, and stories are all welcome: add to the record, or use the invitation at the foot of any person's entry. What is sent goes to a private docket and is checked against the sources before anything here changes; where a new account and an old one cannot be reconciled, both are kept in the ledger of conflicts rather than one being quietly discarded.

Sources & confidence

Each entry carries a note of how well it stands: documented (●) where the sources give dates or narrative, probable (◐) where a person is known only by name and place in the family, and uncertain (○) where even the name is in doubt. The 23 recorded conflicts and 16 anomalies — misdated stones, impossible dates, stories the records cannot support — are kept in Sources & Criticism, because doubt recorded is better than certainty invented.

On the design

The chronicle’s appearance draws on illuminated manuscripts and the engraved genealogies of antique family histories: parchment grounds, iron-gall ink, uncial titling, small-cap marginalia, and Celtic interlace constructed with a true over-and-under weave — a nod to the family’s Welsh beginnings. The ornament is original work in SVG and CSS, and it is kept in service of the reading: a chronicle first, a decoration second.