About
About this Archive
This is a digital edition of a single document: a genealogy report on the Paulson family, compiled and printed in 2006 and later scanned to a 249-page PDF. The site re-presents that report as something you can read, search, and walk through — while keeping every original page one click away.
The source
The original is an ancestor report generated by genealogy software. It is organized as four ancestor charts, one for each of Donald Howard Paulson’s grandparents — the lines of Iver Paulsen, Maude Irene Wright, Fred A. Bills, and Sarah Jane French. Between them they reach back to a farm at Hundorp, Norway; to Mayflower passengers; and to tailors and yeomen in Elizabethan Canterbury.
The method
The scanned pages carried an automatic text layer, but it was badly garbled — names like “Paulson” came through as “Pau.l son,” dates as nonsense. Rather than trust it, each page was transcribed visually from the page image and parsed into structured records: people, dates, places, parents, spouses, children, and notes. The records were then stitched into a single family graph — 758 individuals across 4 lines and 138 places, 161 of them with a full record.
On accuracy
The data is only as good as a 2006 report, and that report was only as good as its sources. A few things to keep in mind:
- Dates shown with “c.” were marked uncertain in the original (e.g. a birth year of “1562?”).
- The surname legitimately shifts from Paulsen to Paulson across the Atlantic crossing — both spellings are kept as written.
- The few photographs are identified only tentatively; confirming who is who is part of the ongoing work.
- Occasional transcription or source errors surely remain. Corrections are welcome.
What’s next
This is a living archive. Planned additions include researched biographies for individuals, and maps — of birthplaces and of the family’s migrations, from Norway and England to New England, the Midwest, and Michigan. The underlying data already records a place and a date for every life event, ready to be put on a map.
Built with Astro · transcribed from the 2006 report · 2026