Aschersleben Electoral Registers

Electoral registers are a dense source for social history: they list the names, addresses and birth years of an entire town on a single day. Their value, however, only emerges once the entries are linked to people already catalogued elsewhere — and that is exactly where the effort lies.

The task

Match the entries from six volumes of holding I-14-149 against the person records in FactGrid. The complication: the volumes belong to three different election days — 5 March and 12 November 1933, and 20 May 1928. The same people therefore appear more than once, addresses shift meaning between the years, and two-digit birth years need a different cut-off depending on the election.

The approach

For every entry the tool computes FactGrid candidates with a score from 0 to 100, broken down into the four component values it derives from — so the ranking can be examined rather than merely trusted. Three routes stay open: accept a suggestion, record that the person is absent from FactGrid (to be created later via CREATE), or re-run the same entry with a lowered threshold.

A second pass matches the register against itself and finds the same person across different volumes. Addresses are tracked per volume, because the same street address can refer to different buildings over the years. The result is a QuickStatements export containing exactly what is currently selected.

The outcome

A working environment open to everyone: deciding and downloading require neither an account nor special permissions. Progress stays visible, every decision is recorded in the history, and none of them is final.