Evidentia 4 is out, and I want to walk through what’s actually new in it now that the release itself isn’t the whole story. Everything below started as design ideas a few months ago. All of it shipped.
This isn’t a full changelog. It’s the short version: five things that change how you work in Evidentia 4, in plain language. I will publish longer posts for each one over the next several weeks.
A Form Assistant for transcribing records
Reading a census image and typing your claims into Evidentia used to require a lot of typing, and it was easy to miss information due to “data fatigue”. The Form Assistant merges them. Pick the form type (all eighteen U.S. census years, 1790 through 1950, are supported, including the 1860 Slave Schedule), fill in the fields against the record image, and Evidentia reads what you entered and suggests claims for the active citation. You review the suggestions and accept the ones that are right, and they become real Claim records with no re-typing.
This is the part I’m genuinely excited about. A single census page can carry a dozen or more separate facts: a name, an age, a birthplace, an occupation, a relationship to the head of household. Cataloging all of that by hand means typing out each one as its own claim, one at a time. The Form Assistant does that step for you. Transcribe the row once, and every fact in it comes back as a suggested claim, ready to accept. You get through a record faster, and just as important, you stop quietly skipping the facts that felt too minor to type out separately. Completeness stops depending on how patient you’re feeling that day.
A Research Plan you can actually save
The Research Plan record type has been sitting reserved in the database since 3+, unused. In v4 it’s real. You frame a research question for a subject and claim type, work a combined log of sources, findings, and citations in one grid, and hand off directly into Analyze Evidence when you’re ready to write a conclusion. Rows in that log with a citation attached can be promoted straight into real Claim and Evidence records with a single action, and you can print the whole log as a worksheet for a trip to the archive where you won’t have a laptop open.
Framing a question before you search is standard genealogical practice independent of any software. The Research Plan just gives it a permanent home in your database instead of a stack of paper.
Markdown export for your reports
Proof reports can now export as Markdown, alongside the formats Evidentia already supported. If you keep research notes in a wiki or a plain-text archive, or you want to paste a proof argument into a blog post, this is for you. A Markdown file will still be readable in twenty years regardless of what software exists by then, which is worth something on its own.
There’s a newer use for this too. If you use an AI assistant to help think through your research, a Research Summary report exported as Markdown is a clean document to hand it: your proven facts for a subject, organized by proof, with the conclusion, evidence, and citations for each one laid out in plain text an AI can read directly, rather than a PDF it has to guess at. That makes it a reasonable thing to paste in when you want help spotting gaps in what you’ve already proven or thinking through where to look next. The research and the conclusions stay yours; the export just makes it easier to put your own proven work in front of a tool that’s good at organizing and asking questions, not at deciding what counts as proof.
Zoom that actually stays where you put it
This one is small, and I still think it matters. The View menu now has Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Actual Size. On a Mac, the shortcuts are Cmd + Plus, Cmd + Minus, and Cmd + 0. On Windows or Linux, they’re Ctrl + Plus, Ctrl + Minus, and Ctrl + 0. There’s also a slider in Options → General if you’d rather drag than press a key. Set it once and it holds across restarts, and any screen that’s felt cramped gets easier to read without touching your whole system’s display settings.
Upgrading to Evidentia 4: one thing to know first
Evidentia 4 uses a brand new kind of license key. Your old Evidentia 3+ key will not work with it. If you plan to upgrade, you will need to get a new key first. I will explain exactly how to do that in its own post very soon.
More detail on each of these is coming, one post at a time, over the next several weeks.
— Ed Thompson, Evidentia Software
