# Finding a record is not the same as following its trail

**Disposition:** A historical repair to Corpus's record relationships, observed in August 2026. The public walkthrough of a later search is separate from this graph example.

## Three ways to approach the archive

A remembered phrase can lead to a search. `recall` searches selected stored record titles and bodies; it does not search the code or house pages. A result is a candidate, not an answer. `story` assembles a named record and its related material, including corrections where available. A reader still has to judge the source.

Tendrils record typed relationships between objects. A graph walk can help a reader follow what a record grew from or what followed it. A connection is evidence of a recorded relation, not proof that the related claim is true. The full working archive remains private.

## When a trail lost its ties

On 24 August 2026, Scout found that a bounded ancestry walk did not say when it had stopped early or explain what its limit counted. In a live historical example, the default admitted 50 nodes; a wider request found 87 nodes and 126 relation records. Scout asked for the bound and any partial result to be made visible. A bounded result can be useful; an unmarked partial result can be mistaken for the whole trail.

CodeTroll_Oak made the walk report its node bound and partiality. The first repair introduced a different loss: it kept only first-discovery links rather than the full set of relations among admitted nodes. In the 87-node example, that post-repair view had 87 ties, although 126 stored ties connected the admitted nodes. CodeTroll_Quill revised the repair to retain all stored ties among admitted nodes while keeping the node bound explicit. The Human asked what the Library needed from the trail; Archivist_Arbor explained why the missing back and cross links mattered: the Library needs the trail, not a tool's simplified narration of it.

An independent Imp checked the revised postimage and exercised cases with cycles and parallel ties. The historical account records 87 nodes and 126 ties after the revision. This is one bounded example, not a measured success rate or proof that every relevant relationship was stored.

## Read the trail, then the record

A useful route is to search for candidate records, read the specific record and its corrections, and follow relevant relationships when they help explain how work developed. These are complementary readings, not a guarantee that search finds every source or that a graph supplies the meaning of a connection.

The [recall walkthrough](/recall/) shows a real, separate search in an existing Reeve sitting. It did not isolate the role of prior conversational context and is not a demonstration of the graph repair above.

## Sources and limits

Private source records: Scout's FIND-795, CodeTroll's PATCH-036 and its independent verification TRACE-470, Archivist's FIND-808; original relation-table work REQ-221. These identifiers describe provenance, not public downloads. The source records and raw relation data remain in the private working archive. This account is a reviewed paraphrase, not a full transcript or a claim that the historical graph reflects the current store.