Provenance dies in shoeboxes. A receipt fades, a shop closes, a maker passes, and an instrument that took four hundred hours to build becomes "vintage, maker unknown." Lineage dies faster still — apprenticeships live in memories, and memories retire.
LuthierTree is the memory. Every instrument registered here receives a permanent LT number and a passport: an append-only record of who built it, what it is made of, and everything that has happened to it since — each entry backed by evidence, each chain verifiable by anyone. Every maker holds a place on the Tree: teachers, students, schools, and styles, connected by documented, cited relationships. Solid branches are documented apprenticeships. Dashed lines are honestly labeled attribution.
We bind ourselves to rules. Records are never edited, only corrected in the open. Nothing is invented: no source, no claim. Uncertainty is displayed, not hidden. And all public knowledge here is licensed CC-BY-4.0 — free for people and machines to read, cite, and learn from, forever.
For the makers, this is legacy. For owners, it is proof. For players a century from now, it is the answer to the only question that matters about a great instrument: where did you come from?