Mobile Monday – CamScanner

Like many people, I spent yesterday’s Easter Sunday with family.  In my case, this involved a visit to my wife’s parents, complete with Easter lunch, napping on the couch, Easter dinner, and some impromptu genealogy work.

One of the mysteries in my wife’s lines is her great-grandfather, Vincent Leliukas.  He went by several names, and lived in different places, making him somewhat difficult to trace.  In the last few months we’ve been in contact with a long-lost cousin, who was able to provide more information and documentation, but no one had a photo.

After dinner yesterday, my wife and I started looking through photo albums that had been left by her grandmother.  I had a vague memory of seeing a photo of Vincent many years ago while my wife and I were dating, but at the time, no one was really sure if it was him, and I wasn’t actively researching her family.  To my delight, we not only found the photo in question, we found a couple of others, labeled by my wife’s grandmother as being images of her father.

To our surprise, we also found Vincent’s Social Security card, dated 1937, in an old wallet.

Here’s where technology, and today’s software review, jumps in.

Obviously, I wanted to record our findings, while also preserving the items.  I pulled my Android phone from my pocket, and loaded up an application that I had downloaded a couple of months ago.  The software in question was CamScanner, an application that turns your phone into a portable scanner.

I’ve only used the application a couple of times, and I’m using the free version, so I may be missing some features.  My short review, however, is that I like it.

To use CamScanner, you use your phone’s camera to take a snapshot of a document.  The screen has a handy “bubble level” in one corner to help you take the best flat image of the document possible.  You can crop the image, then watch as the software turns the image into a PDF.  Even better, if you take another image, it gets added to the PDF as another page.  Very handy for “scanning” pages of books.

Partial Scan from CamScanner

They biggest downside that I’ve found with CamScanner, so far, is that it doesn’t work very well for creating scans of photos.  The reason for this is that the flash of the camera creates a glare on the surface of the photo.  As of yet, I’ve found no way to turn the flash off while scanning.  However, for scanning documents, like Vincent’s Social Security card that we found yesterday, it works very well.  I was even able to scan a folder full of handwritten notes, bundled into a single PDF file, to send to a fellow researcher.

While I wouldn’t use CamScanner for anything needing a high-resolution image, but it’s great for research trips, especially for trips like I had yesterday, where the research was completely unscheduled and impromptu.  All I had to do was take my phone out of my pocket, and start clicking.  For documents, I use CamScanner to create a PDF.  For photos, I just take a snap-shot with my phone's camera, suppressing the flash to eliminate the glare.  When I get home, everything gets uploaded to my laptop, where I can analyze and document any finds.

Saturday Sampling – Evidentia

Last week several blogs that I read mentioned a new software program called Evidentia.  The authors of Evidentia, ed5becy, LLC, describe the software as “a Source Centric genealogy tool” that, unlike most genealogy programs, focuses on a source instead of an individual person.  The authors also claim that the software follows the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) Genealogical Proof Standard.  That is, the software forces you to document your source, perform a reasonably exhaustive search, resolve conflicting evidence and so on.

When I first read about the software, it sounded interesting, but also seemed like it was unnecessary given how I use The Master Genealogist (TMG), my genealogy database of choice.  For instance, Evidentia is supposed to be Source Centric.  Instead of entering a person and their details (birth, death, residence, etc.), you enter a source and then each claim the source makes.  This is actually how I use TMG.  While I may be looking for information about Ernest Solomon Davis, once I find a source of information, I document the source first in the Master Source List, then create a single entry (“tag” in TMG speak) for each “fact” on the source, even if it applies to someone other than Ernest.

Evidentia is also supposed to allow you to easily see conflicting evidence.  For instance, different birth dates for a subject should show up so that you can see the conflict and resolve it by analyzing your sources.  I can also do this with TMG by looking for multiple birth tags for single person; however Evidentia did make it easier to see the sources of the conflicting information.  In TMG, I would have to open each tag to view my sources and the values I attached to them indicating my analysis of if the source provided primary or secondary evidence.  With Evidentia, the screen displayed all sources, along with if the source was primary, secondary, original, derived, and so on.

One of the major reasons that I use TMG is that it is fully customizable.  While the base install does come with many templates for sources, tags, locations, and more, I can also create or modify templates as needed.  I was pleased to see that Evidentia templates could also be customized.

What did I dislike about Evidentia?  Nothing really.  It took a few minutes to get used to the interface, but that happens with any new software application.  The interface is actually very clean and intuitive, and the software forces you to step through each process before moving on to the next.  The tool tips that appear when you hover over an element were handy for learning the interface.

What did I like about Evidentia?  It did force me to slow down while looking at evidence on a source.  For instance, in TMG, if I find evidence of birth information, I would create a birth tag, fill in the date and place if they were shown, and save the data.  With Evidentia I followed the process of “Complete this sentence: The source asserts that…” for every piece of evidence.  For instance, Ernest’s birth information on his death record was listed as 10 May 1873 in Londonderry, Vermont[1].  I typed two sentences on the Catalogue Claims screen: “The source asserts that Ernest Solomon Davis was born on 10 May 1873” and “The source asserts that Ernest Solomon Davis was born in Londonderry, Vermont”.  I actually created 20 different claims from information found on a single index card documenting Ernest’s death.  In TMG I found that I had cited the same card only 8 times.  Part of this, I think, relates to having dates and places recorded in a single tag in TMG, while recording them as separate claims in Evidentia.

The big question, of course, is did I find Evidentia useful enough to purchase?  I can definitely see it being a useful piece of software to help solve complex cases.  I liked the interface and how it forced me to look at each piece of evidence.  I also liked how the software was designed to do exactly what it says.  There weren’t any unnecessary additions that I could see during my trial use.  For folks using genealogy databases that only allow the recording of a single “fact” for things like births and deaths, I can see the software being helpful to look for conflicting evidence.  For me, I think TMG is still sufficient for my needs, though I may have to think about splitting some tags to be more detailed in my analysis.

[1] Ernest Solomon Davis Death Record (1933); digital image, Vermont Death Records, 1909-2008, database online, Ancestry.com (accessed 30 Oct 2012), citing Vermont Death Records, 1909-2003, Vermont State Archives and Records Administration, Montpelier, Vermont.