Two branches of one family,
separated before anyone alive was born.
Families are separated by things nobody chose. Indenture. Slavery. Partition. A war, a border, a ship. Generations later the descendants may hold nothing but a first name, a region, and a decade — too little to search with, and too much to forget.
Thread Recognition works on what actually survives: a married couple. When two branches of the same network independently record an ancestral pair with matching given names, a region in common, and birth years within a narrow window, the system flags a possible match. It does not merge anything. It does not announce a finding. It tells each side, separately, that a possible connection exists.
Only if both sides say they want contact are the names of the living generations surfaced to each other. If one side declines, the other is never told who they were — or that anyone declined.
The machine proposes. Two families decide.
Members in different countries build their own family records without coordinating. Thread Recognition looks across those separately-built trees for people who may be the same person.
ECO surfaces a candidate and shows what matched — a name, a place, a date. It does not merge records, assert a relationship, or notify anyone that they have been matched. The families decide.
A possible shared ancestor is not an introduction. No contact details pass between networks, and neither side sees the other’s content unless both act on it.