Before You Search: Framing a Research Question in the New Research Plan

Post 16 ended with a research question I hadn’t actually written down anywhere: where in Canada, specifically, did Lafayette and Mary Braddock come from? A second one came with it — who are the other four children the 1900 census says Essie had, when I’ve only got one of them on file? Writing those down in my head was easy. Doing something with them is a different problem — and it’s exactly the one the new Research Plan is built to solve.

Evidentia 4 ships Research Plan as a genuine three-step workflow: Frame Question, Gather Evidence, Analyze Evidence. This post is Step 1 — the part where a vague “I should look into that” turns into an actual, named research question attached to an actual person. I picked Lafayette Braddock, Essie’s father, since his Canadian birthplace is the loose end Post 16 left hanging.

One complication: Lafayette isn’t in the database yet. He’s been a name on Essie’s family group sheet for years, nothing more. Starting a research plan for someone who doesn’t have a Subject record turned out to be its own small lesson.

Opening Research Plan

Research Plan lives in the main toolbar, not tucked under a menu. It’s the small notepad-and-checklist icon next to the star — easy to walk past if you’re not looking for it, since nothing about it says “new feature.”

Clicking it opens a fresh plan, ready for a subject.

A Subject Who Isn’t Here Yet

Lafayette isn’t an existing Subject in my database — just a name on Essie’s family group sheet, never entered as a person in his own right. Rather than backing out of Research Plan to go build him first, there’s a person-plus button right beside the Main Subject field. Clicking it opens an Edit Subject modal without leaving the plan.

It asks for the name twice, in two different shapes: “Braddock, Lafayette” for how he’ll sort in lists, “Lafayette Braddock” for how he’ll read in a report. Gender, a Ref No., and a FamilySearch ID are all optional. I filled in the two names and gender, left Ref No. and FamilySearch ID blank, and clicked Done. Lafayette Braddock existed as a Subject for the first time, without a single screen change.

Framing the Research Question

With a subject picked, Frame Question fills in the rest of itself. The Plan Title became “Braddock, Lafayette: Birth” automatically — subject name plus claim type, no typing required.

Claim Type is where I expected to pick “Birth Place” and reach for the dropdown to find it. It isn’t there. Evidentia’s claim types just have “Birth,” and it covers date and place together — which is actually the more honest way to frame it, since a birth record rarely gives you one without the other. I chose Birth, and the Research Question field filled itself in to match: “When and where was Lafayette Braddock born?”

The auto-suggested question is a starting point, not a final answer — the field is editable, and the census already narrows things past “born somewhere.” Lafayette wasn’t born just anywhere; the 1900 form says Canada. The plan captures the general question now; the specific one — where in Canada — is what Gather Evidence and Analyze Evidence are for.

Writing the question down first isn’t just an Evidentia habit. The Board for Certification of Genealogists’ Genealogy Standards call for a clearly stated research objective before the record-pulling starts — a research plan just gives that objective a place to live.

One Subject, or Two

Birth only ever needs one subject — a person either has a birthplace or doesn’t, and there’s no second party to a fact like that. Not every claim type works that way. Marriage, and parent-child claim types like Parent, are inherently about two people, and Frame Question adapts: pick one of those and a second-subject field appears next to Claim Type.

I tried it two ways, on the same person.

First, Marriage. The second-subject field is labeled “Spouse / Partner,” and its placeholder — “— Select person (optional) —” — means exactly that: optional. I left it blank, and the auto-suggested Research Question fell back to something generic: “Research Marriage for Lafayette Braddock.” Not a real question yet, just a placeholder worth typing over — which is fine. A relationship claim type doesn’t force you to already know who the other person is before you can start a plan.

Then I picked Parent instead, and added Essie Braddock as the second subject. The field label changed to “Child” — Evidentia already knows which side of a parent-child relationship I’m asking about, based on the claim type and direction, and labels the field accordingly instead of making me guess. A checkbox appeared underneath: “Limit evidence to this specific pair only,” checked by default. With a real second subject in the picture, the Research Question sharpened too: “Was Lafayette Braddock the father or mother of Essie Braddock?” — an actual yes/no question, not a placeholder.

That checkbox is the real flexibility. Checked, the plan only looks at evidence linking Lafayette and Essie specifically — useful when you already know the pair and want to confirm or disprove it. Unchecked, it would widen to any evidence of Lafayette in a parent role at all, useful when you’re not sure which of his several children a given record is even about, or when you’re researching him as a parent generally rather than one specific relationship. Same claim type, same main subject, two different research questions depending on how much you already know.

No Stepper, Just Three Tabs

I’d expected a progress bar across the top — numbered circles, checkmarks filling in as each step gets done, the kind of thing plenty of wizards use. What’s actually there is plainer: three text tabs, Frame Question, Gather Evidence, Analyze Evidence, with the active one underlined. No numbers, no checkmarks, no lock icons — just plain labels. It’s a smaller piece of UI than I was picturing, and it does the job without getting in the way.

Clicking “Continue to Gather Evidence” moves the plan forward — Lafayette Braddock’s birth question, framed and ready — into Step 2.

That’s where this series picks up next: actually gathering the evidence to answer where in Canada Lafayette Braddock was born.

Research Plan is in the main toolbar now, next to the star, whenever a loose end is worth framing properly instead of just remembering to get back to it. Next in this series: Gather Evidence, and what it actually takes to answer where in Canada Lafayette Braddock was born.

— Ed Thompson, Evidentia Software