Family Historian User Group

I've just tried to use the Electoral Roll template for the first time in AS7, launching AS7 from the FH7 plugin.

The first question is what is the relationship between the Address associated with the Place at the head of the form, and the Address on the individual entries? Which address is used to populate the residence fact?

Second, I have just added four individial entries, but the Auto Text shows only the first and last, irrespective of whether I use plain or formatted text. This behaviour seems to be consistent.

Third, is it possible to autofill the addresses for individuals from the Address field further up the form, as it is probably unlikely that individuals from different addresses would be being recorded by AS? Which subsequently begs the question, are the address fields against the individual actually necessary if the address is entered at the head of the form?

I am basing this comment on the 1960 electoral registser, but it may be applicable to others: can the templates be updated to capture the qualifications to the individual eligibility to vote, or if the vote is a Service vote, and whether or not the individual is eligible for Jury duty?

I've just noticed that the Electoral Register template generates a Census entry. This is surely is not correct. I would have thought that it should generate a Residence fact?

To answer the question in your second post, you can use the Census Template options to change the default fact (which is census) to residence, for an Electoral Register. You will need to do this for each of the year groups.

Thanks Lorna. I hadn't spotted that

mezentia wrote: ↑

21 Dec 2020 15:02

The first question is what is the relationship between the Address associated with the Place at the head of the form, and the Address on the individual entries? Which address is used to populate the residence fact?

The place and address at the top are used to populate the census/residence/custom fact - which you can change if you wish by editing the template as Lorna pointed out.

Second, I have just added four individial entries, but the Auto Text shows only the first and last, irrespective of whether I use plain or formatted text. This behaviour seems to be consistent.

That's strange - I can't reproduce that at all and really there's no technical difference between the way the electoral register is displayed and any other source template. Can you try with the FH7 sample project and see if it does the same with that? Do you use Windows 10?

Third, is it possible to autofill the addresses for individuals from the Address field further up the form, as it is probably unlikely that individuals from different addresses would be being recorded by AS? Which subsequently begs the question, are the address fields against the individual actually necessary if the address is entered at the head of the form?

Yes this is a bit of odd one really. I didn't particularly put a lot of thought into these electoral register templates - I grabbed them off the FHUG knowledge base. The main work I did was on the programming side to add the ability to distinguish between Census, Electoral Register, etc. So I can see what you mean and usually I don't include address or residence within the 'census' columns. But there's not a lot of other data to record other than the name of someone and it does made the transcription more accurate I suppose. Remember that the paler highlighted 'census' columns are not added within facts to your file - those columns are only ever worth filling in if you're using Autotext. For users who don't bother transcribing, it's a waste of time filling those columns in. For the 1945- register theres only two columns and they're both paler coloured (I appreciate that's difficult to tell when they're all pale!).

I am basing this comment on the 1960 electoral registser, but it may be applicable to others: can the templates be updated to capture the qualifications to the individual eligibility to vote, or if the vote is a Service vote, and whether or not the individual is eligible for Jury duty?

You're very welcome to update the templates or to clone them to create new ones, etc. using the template editor.

Best wishes

Nick

Which subsequently begs the question, are the address fields against the individual actually necessary if the address is entered at the head of the form?

I can understand why you are puzzled about the addresses as there is no reason for them to be duplicated for the more modern Electoral Rolls. However, up to 1946 you did not necessarily have to live at the address that entitled you to vote as there were other qualifications. A useful aide memoire can be found at https://electoralregisters.org.uk/timescales.

As I prepared the templates in the Knowledge Base that were the forerunner of those now in AS7, I have been trying to recall my thinking at the time. I believe that I prepared those up to 1945 on the basis that the person's actual residence may not be the same as the qualifying residence so it was necessary to have two addresses but didn't think that through for the later Electoral Registers. In mitigation, I had not entered any of those into my own project so the significance bypassed me

Brian

Thanks for the replies.

I've tried the Electoral Register entry with the sample project and have obtained a similar result, as shown in the attached screenshot. I'm running Win 10 Pro V10.0.19041 with all updates applied on a Dell XPS 8300 with 12Gb memory.

I am actually amending the templates as I record electoral register entries from various years to record the entry numbers, voting eligibilty, and whether the individual is eligible for jury service. I have yet to work out how to record the constituency and ward other than as a note.

Reading the previous replies, I now think that the Address against an individual's entry is probably more correctly a "Qualifying address", that is the address of the individual's property that qualifies them to be able to vote in that constituency, which may or may not be their place of abode. As the abode and qualifying address are often the same, an option to autofill the qualifying address from the abode on the actual data entry form would be a useful addition.

This is when adding to a 1932 Electoral Register template:
The first three emply names are various spouses. The last empty line is the unmarried mother of the three individuals listed.

Yes, the Auto text for Electoral Register omits the women's names! Are we still not allowed to vote?

Thanks for reporting this issue - it was actually a problem caused by the 'census' date not having a month and day - all earlier versions of AS required a full date for the entry. The system that tries to determine the likely married name at the time of the census for a woman had got confused by the lack of day/month. This will be fixed in the next version.

Best wishes

Nick