From a Handwritten Tax List to Structured Data

Registers, tax lists, and other records arranged in columns can be valuable sources for research. They can also be painstaking to transcribe: each name and number needs to land in the right field.

In this 15-minute demo, I use a 1769 North Carolina tax document to show how to set up AI Drafts for field-based transcription in FromThePage. I configure fields for the county, date, names, and counts; add instructions for details that vary between pages; and run a draft on one page to see how well the setup works.

I recently introduced the single page draft feature because we need it for projects like these. I can inspect the AI’s results, adjust the fields or instructions if needed, and test again before creating drafts for the rest of the collection. In the video, the draft does an impressive job with difficult handwriting, but I still spot a missing comma and mistranscribed name. A transcriber can use the draft to fill the fields, check it against the image, and make corrections before saving.

The goal is to give people a useful starting point for structured records but keep review in their hands.

Watch how it works.

Prefer to read?Follow the written instructions.