Custodian is a set of source-based databases with data entry forms designed to store genealogical information. Many family historians collect a great deal of information about people with the same surname - not necessarily linked! How this information is stored and organised has long been of interest to family historians, especially those conducting a One-Name Study. This is where Custodian can help.
There are over 100 data entry forms for all sorts of records, such as parish records, civil registration, census returns, wills, deeds, military and school, to name but a few. Each data entry form is customisable - most have all the fields you need to get started but you can add fields of your own. Every person in a record can be indexed and every person can have a Personal and Family Reference, which is used to assign him/her to a family group. So even though many of the people in your records have no proven link, those that do can be identified, and as your research progresses and more links are found, so you can update your information in Custodian. And furthermore (and new for version 3) you can produce Family Group trees for those you do identify links for.
Some of the data-entry forms included are:
- Apprentices
- Armed Services
- Cemetery Records
- Census
- Civil Registration
- Court Records
- IGI
- Marriage Licences
- Migration
- Monumental Inscriptions
- National Burial Index
- Parish Records
- Poor Law Records
- Probate
- Published Sources
- School Records
- Taxes and Population Lists
There are two Indexes in which you can browse the whole of your dataset. The Name Index includes key fields from the source records and the Place Index gives you information about all the places mentioned in your records. You can add extra names and places to the Indexes from every record - so for example a copy of a will may contain the names and residences of beneficiaries, witnesses, guardians, executors, as well as the testator. You decide which of these people you want included in the Name Index.
The facilities in Custodian allow you flexibility in handling your data - for example, you may want to sort your parish register entries by parish and date, but you may want to sort your births, marriages and deaths indexes by Registration District and year and quarter. Each data entry form can be sorted by any, or all, of the fields. You can also filter out certain records - for example, you might want to find out what entries in the IGI form you have for a particular name and a particular year of christening. You can do this in Custodian and then print or export the results if you wish. Both of these facilities, and others, use Wizards to make this process as simple as clicking on the items of your choice.
For more information about Custodian's range of features, click here to go to the publisher's website.
