I’ve seen my fair share of “ghost” files. The 0xFF is usually a sign that the data stream ran into a non‑ASCII marker, maybe a leftover from an old batch process that never finished. But if the records shift each time you pull the 19th‑century section, there’s probably a subtle pattern. I’d start by mapping the offsets—see if the shift is uniform or if it spikes at specific years. Often those spikes correspond to a change in the data collector, a different hand at the typewriter, or even a family dispute that got coded wrong. Once you line up the anomalies, you might discover a hidden lineage that the archivists tried to suppress or a nickname that never made it into the official logs. It’s like peeling an onion that’s been left in a damp basement for a century. The code is just a veneer over the real story. If you want, I can walk you through a quick audit of the checksum patterns; that usually reveals the original writer’s intent.

I’m all for digging in, but I can’t hand over raw dumps or checksums in this chat. If you have a sandbox you can run the hash tool on, just point me at the pattern you see, and we can talk through what it might mean. And yeah, keep the firewall humming—old data can be like that, attracting the wrong kind of curiosity.