Forms
Practical genealogy forms for transcribing, comparing, and organizing records
Forms on this site come two ways: a blank to print and fill in by hand, and a fillable version to type into in the browser. Note: Fillable forms open in a new tab and don't save on their own — print or save to PDF before closing the tab.
The blank is for printing — take it to an archive, or work from a screen with the paper alongside. The fillable version is typed into in the browser and then printed or saved as PDF. Nothing is stored: closing the tab discards what was typed, so save before closing.
Before 1850, only the head of household was recorded by name. Everyone else in the house appears as tally marks in age, sex, and race columns — so the sheet has tally boxes rather than a row per person. The Tick Mark Chart under Reference Charts gives the age and birth-year range behind each column, which is what turns a tally into an estimate for a specific person. One continuation sheet serves all six years.
A household can run past the last row on the page. On a printed form filled in by hand, the continuation sheet is the second page — same columns, no header block to fill in twice. The fillable sheets don’t need one: they add a continuation page themselves when the last row is reached, and renumber the page count. From 1850 on, each year has its own, because from 1850 each year’s columns differ.
The 1890 schedules were almost entirely destroyed after a fire in 1921, and what survives covers only fragments of a few states — so there is no sheet for 1890, and there will not be one. Sheets for 1900 through 1950 are in preparation and are added as they are finished; the tile for each year shows its status.
The standard sheet carries birth, marriage, and death for each person. The christening-and-cemetery version adds a christening line and a burial place, for families where church and cemetery records are the main sources. The side-by-side layouts arrange the children across the page rather than down it, which fits the same children in less of the page’s height. Each layout comes with and without the christening and cemetery fields.
A family group sheet holds one family unit: the two parents, their marriage, and their children, each with the vital dates and places that identify them. It is the working record a household’s evidence is gathered onto before it goes into a database or a tree — everything about one family on one page, so gaps and conflicts are visible at a glance.
Every form here began as a request from a working genealogist: something needed repeatedly, with nothing available that did the job. The library grows the same way it started, a sheet at a time, and a description of the job a form would do is the most useful thing to send.
The pedigree chart shows a person and six generations of their direct ancestors — parents, grandparents, and on back — on a single page, with a line for each. It is a map rather than a record: the family group sheets hold the detail, and the chart shows how they connect.
Three additions, combined six ways — color is never paired with ruled lines. Ruled lines under each name for filling in by hand. An ID box beside each name for a database record number or a reference to the person’s group sheet. Color by generation, so a generation can be picked out at a glance across the whole chart. The standard chart has none of them; the variants add them in the order listed.
Two worksheets for the point where records conflict. Identity Analysis works through the question of whether one or more profiles describe the same person, different people, or a conflation of two — fact by fact, with each item weighed on its own. Profile Comparison sets two profiles side by side, field by field, to confirm they agree before a merge is made. Both are for deciding on paper before deciding in the database, where a wrong merge is hard to undo.
A research log starts from a stated objective — the question being asked — and records the search against it: what was searched, on what date, what was found, and what the outcome was. Each row holds the source and where it was consulted, the findings, and a status — complete, more research needed, or stopped on a given page — with a match yes/no for the person being sought. A notes block at the foot carries next steps. It is what stops the same source being searched twice, and what lets a search be picked up months later where it was left.
Lookup tables for reading a census schedule. The Tick Mark Chart turns the tally columns of the 1790–1840 censuses into birth-year ranges, one range per tick, for the census year in hand. The Census Quick Reference Chart lists, for each census year, which research questions its schedule can answer — which years give birthplace, which give parents’ birthplaces, which give immigration information — so the right year can be reached for first. The Mortality Quick Reference Chart does the same for the mortality schedules of 1850 through 1880, which recorded the people who died in the year before each census and are indexed separately from the population schedules.
Every federal census asked its own set of questions, and the columns changed every decade. A generic grid forces a decision, while reading, about which of its columns a given piece of information belongs in — and that decision is where transcription errors get introduced. These sheets carry the same columns in the same order as the original schedule, so the sheet can be checked against the image line by line without translating anything.