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Sources & Methodology

How published material is documented

Reading a source alongside notes and a draft.Drawn in cream, forest green, and muted terracotta. People and objects are symbolic illustrations.
Reading a source alongside notes and a draft.Illustration: The BJJ Story

The BJJ Story uses immigration records, newspaper archives, tournament results and academic research from multiple countries. Source coverage varies by page and field. Published source links identify the evidence currently recorded; their presence and scope vary with the material. Gaps remain part of the research status.

Check a fact or suggest a correction

  1. Open the source link beside the passage, event or teaching connection you want to check.
  2. Use the page number, section or source note to find the relevant passage. A source may support only part of a story.
  3. If something is wrong or missing, send us the page link, the detail to correct and a source if you have one.
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Our methodology

Rivenholt AS publishes The BJJ Story and is responsible for its content and corrections. We make BJJ history, people and terminology accessible through accounts that readers can trace to their sources.

How AI is used

AI agents research sources, draft text and review material for this site. In our current profile process, separate agents carry out research, writing and review. The reviewer reads the sources and checks the draft and short summary. Guides also receive a separate review of their text, factual claims and explanatory figures before publication.

What separate review means

The reviewing agent is separate from the writing agent. These are AI roles, not named human historians or an external expert panel. A review date records a check of the material identified on the page; it does not mean that every fact in the archive has been checked or that a human expert approved the article.

AI can misread a source or repeat a writer’s mistake. We use source links, checks on individual claims and a corrections process to make those errors easier to find. Documentation varies across older and newer entries. Check the source notes for the passage or field you are using, and tell us when they do not support it.

We treat BJJ history as an open, living field of research — not a finished narrative. When new scholarship uncovers people, connections, or events that were previously unknown, we integrate them into our database with clear source attribution.

In the lineage tree, a solid line marks a connection recorded as verified; the linked source shows the evidence currently published. A dashed line marks a connection recorded as unverified or based on limited documentation.

Where competing narratives exist — for example, about who taught Carlos Gracie — we present both versions side by side, with source citations, and let the reader evaluate.

Source tiers

  • Primary sources

    Contemporary documents: newspaper articles, immigration records, tournament results, period photographs.

  • Academic research

    Published research and in-depth investigations by dedicated historians such as Josh Simon (simonbjj.com), Roberto Pedreira, and others.

  • Reference works

    Wikipedia, BJJ Heroes and Sherdog. We use them and we name them, the same way we name an academy page or a newspaper, and we prefer a primary source where one exists. What we do not do is follow their prose: a comparison on 12 August 2026 found biography text that stayed too close to its sources, and that text is still withdrawn. Text published since is our own, written from sources we name on the page.

  • Tradition & oral sources

    Family stories, academy traditions, interviews. Valuable but may be colored by personal interests — marked as unverified in the database.

Key research contributions

Josh Simon — simonbjj.com

Much of the extended research in our database is based on the extensive archival work of Josh Simon. Through years of research in Brazilian newspaper archives, immigration records, and primary sources, Simon has uncovered people and connections previously unknown or underreported in BJJ history — including Jacyntho Ferro, Donato Pires dos Reis, Sada Miyako, and documentation about Japanese pioneers in Brazil.

Visit simonbjj.com

Verified vs. unverified

Solid line

Recorded as verified — open the linked source to inspect the published evidence.

Dashed line

Unverified connection — based on tradition, oral sources, or limited documentation.

Image credits

Published portraits come from Wikimedia Commons and other free archives. Each displayed portrait shows the creator credit recorded on the linked source page, together with the recorded licence and any modification notice. The list below repeats the current portrait attributions by person.

Licensing

Text. Most of what you read here is written by us and is ours. Some biographies were adapted from Wikipedia and are therefore covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence of the article they came from; where such a text is published, that licence and its version are named on the page, and our adaptation is offered under the same licence. Separately, we cite reference works — Wikipedia, BJJ Heroes, Sherdog — as sources for individual claims, alongside other sources, and name them on the page where we do. Following their wording is a different matter: a comparison on 12 August 2026 identified biography text that stayed too close to its sources, and that text is still withdrawn. Profiles without a published biography remain in research status until new text passes review; any visible facts have their own recorded source links.

Read the history of BJJ