Use the data

Read the licence field of the file you are taking. Every file derived from somebody else's work declares whose and on what terms, and the table below prints what each one actually says rather than one blanket claim over all of them.

• ODbL 1.0, © OpenStreetMap contributors — the archives and the cemeteries harvested from OSM, and the 60,883 Irish townlands, which come from Townlands.ie. Attribution required, and share-alike: a derived database has to be published under ODbL too.
• CC0 1.0 — the sets harvested from Wikidata, because Wikidata is CC0, and the surname corpus, which declares it.
• No licence stated — the holdings list of HR-HDA-883, the register collection of the Croatian State Archives, taken from the published inventory in Angelika Milić, «Zbirka matičnih knjiga u Hrvatskom državnom arhivu», Arhivski vjesnik 60 (2017), 251–311, hrcak.srce.hr/194831. The article is openly readable on HRČAK and grants no licence — not CC, not public domain, nothing. Openly readable is not openly licensed, so none is asserted here and none should be inferred. What is carried is the factual content of an inventory of a state holding — parish, confession, register type, years — and not the author's text, arrangement or commentary. If you reuse it, cite Milić 2017 and satisfy yourself independently; do not rely on us having cleared it, because we have not.
• CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution AND share-alike — the English Wiktionary, for what a surname is said to be. Three things are taken and no prose: the language sections a name is tagged a surname under, the from= of Wiktionary's own surname template, and the word a name derives from where the template names one. The Etymology and Statistics sections are somebody's writing and are left alone — a template parameter is a fact in a field, and that is the line. Every row carries the page and the revision it was read at, because Wiktionary changes under you. Share-alike: a database derived from this part has to carry the same licence.
• CC BY 4.0, attribution required — GeoNames, which is the gazetteer and therefore the reason any old place name resolves at all; and Statbel, for the Belgian surnames at commune grain.
• CC BY 3.0 IT — Istat, for the Italian comuni.
• Open Government Licence v3.0 — the National Records of Scotland, for the civil parishes.
• Trove API Terms of Use — the 2,014 Australian newspaper titles, from the National Library of Australia. Two conditions, and the second is unusual. Attribution must name the contributing source AND Trove, with a link back, which is why every newspaper row carries the National Library as its holder and links to its own Trove page. And the metadata may only be CACHED FOR THIRTY DAYS — so this atlas re-harvests fortnightly and scripts/build.py fails the build once the file is older than thirty days. A static site that bakes its data in would otherwise drift out of the terms in silence.
• Public domain — Natural Earth, for the country outlines.
• Terms not declared — the Estonian parish and county vocabularies from the Rahvusarhiiv. Said plainly rather than assumed either way.
• FamilySearch catalogue metadata — not an open licence. This one matters most and this page had it wrong. Every volume title and waypoint id in a place file comes from FamilySearch's catalogue: «Defunciones 1980-1989» is their cataloguing, not our writing. The fact that a collection covers a place is not theirs to own and is what this atlas is for; the titles are theirs. Take the shape and the coverage freely, and do not treat the strings as relicensable.
• This atlas's own compilation — the index, the place files, the record regions, the provider spine, the flag timelines and the 1,454 hand-drawn flags that go with them. That is our research and it carries no licence file yet, because the repository has none to point at. Declaring one is the owner's to do and not a build script's; until it is done, take it and cite it.

What no licence here covers: the records themselves. This atlas publishes pointers — that a collection exists, what it covers, where to look. Each provider sets its own terms for the images and indexes at the other end of those links, and those terms are theirs.

# every place the map can draw
curl -s https://recordatlas.org/index.json | jq '.places | length'

# one place, in full
curl -s https://recordatlas.org/p/gracisce.json

# which archive held this ground, and when
curl -s https://recordatlas.org/regions.json | jq '.regions[0]'

No key, no rate limit, no account, readable from any origin — these are static files on GitHub Pages, which is also why there is no query endpoint. Fetch the index and filter it yourself; it is 1.7 MB.

40,266 places, 2,828,300 record volumes, 552 providers, 41 jurisdiction regions. Rebuilt whenever anything lands, so these files move under you — there is no version number, because adding a field and calling it v1 forever would be a promise this project cannot keep. Fields are added; existing fields are not quietly repurposed.

Subscribe to the feed to be told when they change, or read what changed. If you build something with this, say so — knowing what the data is used for is the only way to know which parts are worth deepening.