An occurrence is a single appearance of the name in a source - a name, in a place, at a time. Everything is stored exactly as recorded; standardised values used for sorting and mapping are kept separately and stay correctable.

Keyboard-first entry #

On the Occurrences tab, context fields stay put between records and the cursor returns to the name field, so you can key a whole register without the mouse. Dates like "Q3 1861", "abt 1790" and "1751/52" are understood, and anything unreadable is stored exactly as written.

Importing a spreadsheet #

On the Import tab, upload a CSV and match each column to a study field on the next screen. FreeBMD and census layouts are recognised automatically, and census facts (age, occupation, relation, condition, birthplace) land in their own fields.

• Values are stored verbatim - nothing is merged or overwritten.
• Save your column matching as a template, remembered by heading, so next quarter's import is one click.
• Every import is a record set: it is listed with its row count and can be undone as a whole, without touching anything else.
• Importing the same file twice creates duplicates by design - use the undo to reverse a wrong import.