An artefact is one piece of evidence: a certificate, a photograph, a screenshot, a page of notes, a spreadsheet row. The Artefacts tab is where it gains whatever detail you want to give it.

The fields #

• Title and type - both optional. An untitled artefact shows as "Untitled" with its capture date.
• Tags - free text, comma separated, as you enter them.
• Transcription - the source's own words.
• Comments - your remarks, doubts and reminders.
• Linked people - who the artefact is about, from your tree.
• Analysis fields - source and information classification, optional and never required.

Transcript and comments are never merged #

This is a hard rule, and it follows genealogical standard practice. The transcription holds what the document says; your comments hold what you think about it. They are stored separately and never run together, so a later reader can always tell the record from the interpretation.

Verbatim storage #

A transcription is stored exactly as you type it, including spacing, line breaks and conventions such as "<sic>". The plugin will not tidy it, reflow it or strip it; it removes only characters that are never part of a transcription, such as control codes, and rejects text that is not valid UTF-8. What you typed is what is stored, and it is escaped when displayed.

Provenance #

Every transcription carries where it came from, its status and its date. This matters most with the Pro AI transcription: machine output is marked unverified until you confirm or correct it, and AI never replaces text you typed, corrected or confirmed.