Transcribe Once, Catalog Faster: Introducing the Form Assistant

I built the Form Assistant because a census page hands you a dozen or more facts about one household — names, ages, birthplaces, occupations, relationships, sometimes military service or literacy — and cataloging every one of them by hand, one claim at a time, for every person on the page, is real work. I’ve caught myself skipping facts when “data fatigue” sets in, the ones that feel too minor to type out on their own. Researchers have been doing it that way since Evidentia’s first release.

Open a citation in Catalog Claims, click Form Assistant, and you get a table that matches the record in front of you, one column for each fact the form actually asks about.

All 18 Census Years, One Assistant

Every U.S. federal census from 1790 through 1950 is supported, including the 1860 Slave Schedule. Pick the year printed on your record and the Form Assistant loads the columns for that year. An 1850 household schedule doesn’t ask the same questions a 1940 one does, and the form in front of you shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Transcribe, Then Let Evidentia Suggest

Fill in the rows the way you’d read the page: left to right, person by person. Each row saves as you go, so a closed laptop or an interrupted library visit doesn’t cost you the transcription. When you’re done, click Suggest. Evidentia reads back everything you entered and proposes a claim for each fact you captured, ready for your review. Arrow keys move you up and down a column the way they would in a spreadsheet, so your hands don’t have to leave the keyboard between rows.

Review Before You Accept

I don’t trust a suggested claim blindly, and you shouldn’t either. The Form Assistant only knows what you typed, and what you typed can still be wrong — a census taker’s sloppy 3 read as an 8, a row filled in from the line above by mistake. So nothing gets added to your citation without you looking at it first. Accept a suggestion and it becomes a real Claim record. Reject one and it’s off the list, at least until you change your mind — Unreject brings it right back.

Edit a row and click Suggest again, and I didn’t want your earlier calls thrown out every time the page gets re-checked. They aren’t. Whatever you already accepted or rejected stays exactly as you left it.

From there it’s the Catalog Claims you already know: pull the claim into Analyze Evidence, weigh it against the citation, and write your conclusion the way the Genealogical Proof Standard asks you to. The Form Assistant doesn’t skip that step for you. It was never supposed to.

The next post in this series walks through a real census page from start to finish, one household, every suggestion reviewed. Until then, the Form Assistant is waiting in Catalog Claims whenever you open your next citation.

— Ed Thompson, Evidentia Software