                 Documentation for GACP ver 2.10

INTRODUCTION:  The purpose of this program is to assist someone
extracting information from any decennial US census from 1790
through 1920.  Versions prior to 2.00 only handled 1850 and
later.  As most of the 1890 census no longer exists there is no
provision for handling that census.

INCLUDED FILES:

GACP.EXE       The program.  This is the only file that is
               actually necessary. 

READ-ME.TXT    This documentation file.

FORM1790       These are blank forms that may be printed out to
FORM1800       assist you in the census extractions.  They are in
.              no way necessary to the program GACP.EXE.  
.
.
FORM1920

INSTALLATION: The file GACP.EXE should be placed in its own
directory.  All the databases that the program creates are
actually sub-directories of the directory that has GACP.EXE.  On
startup the program looks for any sub-directories and assumes
they are databases.  No harm results if the sub-directory is not
a database but it can be confusing.

PROGRAM LIMITS:  The program can handle a database of 65534
records with twenty-four people per record, a total of 1,572,816
individuals per database.  The program allows up to 256
databases.  Note:  Since each database is set up as a sub-
directory DOS may restrict the number of databases if you run the
program from a floppy.  Running from a floppy is extremely slow
so it is recommended that you run from the hard drive.

MONOCHROME MONITORS:  The program will try to detect whether the
monitor is monochrome or color.  Many laptops will indicate to
the program that they have color monitors when in fact they have
monochrome monitors.  This may result in no highlighting and/or a
display that is difficult to read.  To force the program to
overide the auto-detection and use monochomatic codes for the
display you must run the program with the switch '-mono', i.e.,

GACP -mono

ENTERING DATA:  The cursor will be in the highlighted field. 
Data is entered in the usual manner.  Once you get to the right
hand side of the highlighted field any entry of data will cause
the left hand side of the field to scroll off and be lost.  The
left and right arrow keys will move the cursor to the left or
right.  The END key will move the cursor to the right of the
entered data, the HOME key will move the cursor to the left hand
side of the data field.  The DEL key will delete the character
above the cursor, after which, the characters to the right of the
vacated space will all move one space to the left.  CTRL-DEL will
delete the whole field.  CTRL-END will delete everything to the
right of the cursor.  The ESC key will restore the field to
whatever it was when you first entered it.  All data entry is in
the "insert" mode, not the "typeover" mode.  You may use the TAB
key to move to the next field or use SHIFT-TAB (SHIFT-TAB means
to hold down the shift key and hit the tab key) to move to the
previous field.  

STARTUP:  From the DOS prompt type "GACP" to start the program. 
(see above if you are using a laptop with a monochrome display) 
You will be shown a picklist of choices.  If you have not
previously entered any data then the only choices you will be
given are '<newdata>' and '<merge>'.  If you have previously
entered data then you will also see the one, or more, databases
you have started.  Use the up and down arrow keys to highlight
your choice then hit the ENTER (sometimes called RETURN ) key.  

If you have chosen '<newdata>' then you will be asked for a name
to be given to the data.  If you want to enter only your 'Smiths'
then you might choose the name SMITH for your data, or if all
your data is from Georgia then you might choose GEORGIA.  You may
choose up to eight letters and/or digits.  All letters will
become uppercase even if you enter them as lower case.  You can
of course enter all your data into just one data base.  The
program will enable you to later pull out all 'Smith's or all
Georgia records if you want them.

If you have chosen a pre-existing data base then the program will
go there and show the last record in that base.  If you have
chosen a data base that has no information in it, or have just
created a data base from <newdata>, then you will be asked to
create a header for the first record.  

     There are two types of information entered on the
     census.  The "header" information consists of the
     District/Township, County, State, Date of Enumeration
     etc.  Attached to each header are the individuals with
     their information.

HEADERS:  You will first be asked for the census year.  Using the
arrow keys you may pick 1790 through 1920.  After selecting the
year hit ENTER and you will be presented with a screen for
entering the header information for that year.

When entering the header you MUST enter something for the State,
otherwise the header will be discarded.  You may leave any or all
of the other fields blank.  After entering the header information
hit the 'F7' key to return to the census layout.  There is no
error checking on the information entered.  Where a number is
called for, such as a house number, you may enter something like
"$^*)" and the program will accept it.

Only the essential parts of the header information will be shown. 
If you need to see the rest of the information you must hit 'M'
(for Modify).  You will see the same screen setup that you saw
when you originally entered the information.  You may use the
arrow keys to move to a field in order to change it or you may
simply look at the information.  Hit the 'F7' key to return to
the census layout.

Hitting 'O' (for Output) will send the current header with its
individuals to the text (ASCII) file GARECOUT.TXT.  If the file
GARECOUT.TXT already exists then the record will be appended to
the end of the file.  

If you have not sorted your database then the census headers will
be in the same order as you entered them.  You may view the
previous record by hitting 'P' and the following record by
hitting 'N'.  If there is no previous record or following record
then no action will take place.

SEARCHING THE DATABASE: Hitting 'S' will let you search your
database.  All of the searching in insensitive to case.  If you
are searching for Talbot Co you may enter TALBOT, talbot, or
tALBot.  If you want to find everybody on page 272 of the Talbot
Co census you would enter '272' for 'Page No'.  If you leave
'Page No' blank you will find everybody in Talbot Co, regardless
of page number.

Entering a surname will let you find all records that contain
that name.  If you answer 'Y' to 'Soundex Equivalents?' you will
find not only the records with the surname you entered but also
all records that have a surname with the same soundex code.  If
you entered 'WHATLEY' in the surname field and answer 'N' to
'Soundex Equivalents?', you will only find the WHATLEYs.  If you
answer 'Y' in the 'Soundex Equivalents?' field you will also find
WATLEYs, WATLYs, and WADLEYs.  To get the soundex equivalents you
must answer with a 'Y' or 'y'.  Anything else counts as an 'N'.  

In the 'Year' field put the census year, not the actual year the
census was done.  These are usually the same but not always. 
Some of the 1850 enumeration was still being done in early 1851. 
To search for one of these records you would put '1850' in the
'Year' field.  

In the fields 'Other Names', 'Neighbors', and 'Notes' you may put
any string of characters.  The strings of characters will be
searched regardless of whether they are complete words or names. 
For example, putting 'Milton' in the 'Other Names' field will not
only turn up all people named 'Milton', but it will also find all
people named 'Hamilton'.  Putting 'ington' in the 'Neighbors'
field will turn up 'Covington', 'Weatherington', and 'Arrington'
among others.

To exit the search mode without doing a search enter 'Y' in the
'Cancel Search?' field.

You may (and generally will) leave some fields blank.  A blank
field is equivalent to an 'all' specification.  For example, if
you enter 'AL' for 'State' and 'HIGHTOWER' for 'Surname' and
leave all other fields blank; the program will find all records
from Alabama that have the surname HIGHTOWER, regardless of the
county, regardless of the year, and regardless of the firstname. 
Another example, if you enter 'Greene' for 'County' and '1850'
for 'Year', you will get all the 1850 records for Greene Co AL,
Greene Co GA, Greene Co IL, and any other Greene counties you may
have in your database.

After making your search selections hit 'F7'.  The program will
find all records that meet your specification and sort them.  The
sorting is done first by year, then by state, then by county, 
then by (printed)page number, and finally by family number.  You
will be told the number of records found and you may then view
them by using the TAB key and the SHIFT-TAB key.

Hitting the 'T' key will send all the records found to the text
(ASCII) file GASRCOUT.TXT.  IMPORTANT: If the file already exist
then it will be overwritten with the new records.  An index of
the people in the found records will also be sent to the file. 
Sorting the people in order to produce the index may take a
while.  See your computer and/or printer manuals for instructions
on sending the file to your printer.

Hitting the 'S' key will send the found records to a new
database.  You will be prompted for the name that you want to
give to this new data base.  You may NOT use a name that's
already being used.  This is useful if you have all your census
records in one large data base and want to pull out all the
JONESes for a second database.  Note:  This is one way to sort
all the records; leave all selection fields blank so that all
records are 'found' (and sorted) and then send them to a new
database.

DELETING RECORDS: Hitting the 'D' key will let you delete a
census record.  You will be prompted to verity that you really
want to delete the record.

VIEWING THE .TXT FILES  The files GARECOUT.TXT and GASRCOUT.TXT
are text (ASCII) files and can be examined with almost any file
viewer.  These files are essentially images of the input screen. 
They do contain "high" ASCII characters (the vertical lines,
horizontal lines, and corners).  As such, you will probably NOT
be able to view them with a Windows program such as Notepad.

Previous versions of this program were shareware.  The status of
those versions and this latest version has been changed to
freeware.  I have found this program useful in handling my own
census extractions and hope others will find it just as useful.
So that others may also get a chance to evaluate this program, it
and this documentation file may be distributed to any individual,
computer bulletin board (BBS) or on-line service.

When the header bar is highlighted the cursor (arrow) keys may be
used to 'scroll' the individuals.  If there are more than twelve
individuals then use the up and down arrows to view all of them. 
Use the left and right arrows to view information that is off the
screen.

INDIVIDUALS:  Hitting the PageDown key will highlight the
individual bar and blank out the header bar.  Use the downarrow,
'A', or 'M' key to add or modify an individual.

Each field of the individual will be highlighted and the
individual status bar will tell you the information to be
entered.  All information in the fields is stored as a character
string and there is no error checking on entry.  In other words,
you may give the individual a lastname of 'SMITH123++XYZ' and the
program will accept it, or for sex you may enter any character,
not just 'M' or 'F'.  After leaving the LASTNAME field all
letters in that field are automatically capitalized.  After
leaving the FIRSTNAME field the first letter of the name(s) is
capitalized and the other letters are put to lower case.  If the
LASTNAME field is blank but the FIRSTNAME field is not blank then
the LASTNAME is set to the same as the LASTNAME directly above
it.  This will not actually take place until you leave the
individual layout and return to the header layout.  This can
speed up data entry.  To skip over the remaining fields of an
individual and start a new person you may hit CTRL-ENTER.  This
will put you in the first field (LASTNAME) of the next line. 
This can also speed up data entry.  If both LASTNAME and
FIRSTNAME are blank then the person is completely eliminated. 
There is a limit of twenty-four people per header.  This should
be enough to handle just about any family.  If you're are dealing
with an institution or hotel or some facility where there are
more people then you will need to set up more than one header.

OUTPUT TO PRINTER:  This program does not send any output
directly to your printer, instead all output is to the files
GARECOUT.TXT and GASRCOUT.TXT.  The best way to print these files
is with your word processing program.  Import these files
directly into your word processor (they are ASCII files) and
print from there.  In order to prevent line wrap you will
probably have to reduce the margins.  The reports for the 1790-
1840 censuses are all 79 characters wide so any printer should be
able to handle them.  The reports for 1850, 1860, and 1870 are
92, 100, and 110 characters wide respectively.  You will not be
able to print these with the normal 10 characters per inch (cpi). 
You will need to tell you word processing program to print 12 cpi
or 16.7 cpi.  For the 1880-1920 reports you will have to tell
your word processing program to print in "landscape" mode.  I've
had no problems using WordPerfect 5.1 with a Laser Jet II
printer.  Because the files contain "high ASCII" characters, a
Windows program will not be suitable for printing them.  If a
Windows program is the only choice then make sure you are using a
fixed pitch font.

If do not have a word processing program then you should be able
to print the 1790-1840 reports by typing "PRINT GARECOUT.TXT" or
"PRINT GASRCOUT.TXT" at the DOS command line.  The file PRINT.COM
must be in you path.  For the 1850-1870 reports you will have to
first set your printer for 12 cpi or 16.7 cpi.  See your printer
manual for instructions.  For the 1880-1920 reports you will also
have to tell your printer to print in "landscape".  

Unfortunately some dot matrix printers will not print directly in
landscape.  If such is the case with your printer then you will
not be able to print the 1880-1920 reports unless you have a
third party utility for your particular printer which will allow
you to do so indirectly.

MERGING DATABASES:  The startup screen will let you start a new
database, merge existing databases, or use an existing database. 
If you choose to merge existing databases you will be asked to
name the resulting database.  You will then be given a picklist
of the existing databases.  Use the up and down arrows to move
through the picklist.  Select the databases to be merged by using
the spacebar.  An asterisk will be be shown to the left of the
selected databases.  If you hit the spacebar again the asterisk
will be removed and the database will not be merged.

To make effective use of the merging capability you should have
some familiarity with MS-DOS.  Suppose you have a database called
PRCNCT1 and another researcher has a database called PRCNCT2 and
you want to combine the two databases.  In the same directory
where you have GACP.EXE you will have a sub-directory called
PRCNCT1.  Create a sub-directory called PRCNCT2.  The other
researcher will already have a sub-directory called PRCNCT2.  In
that sub-directory will be two files called GAC$HEAD.DTA and
GAC$PERS.DTA.  These two files need to be copied from the PRCNCT2
sub-directory on their computer to the PRCNCT2 sub-directory on
your computer.  Now when you start the program you will have
databases called PRCNCT1 and PRCNCT2 and you may merge them into
a database called, for example, ALLCITY.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:  This program was designed as a one-to-many
database.  One file contains header information and one file
contains information on the individuals.  The header and person
structures consist entirely of character strings.  While it is
possible to go into the data files directly with a file editor,
EXTREME CAUTION SHOULD BE USED!  This program was written in
TurboC 2.01

PROGRAM HISTORY:  

Version 1.01.  A minor bug pertaining to the indexing was
detected in Ver 1.0 and corrected 08/23/94.  

Version 1.02.  Data entry was enhanced by retaining the census
year when adding a header and using CTRL-ENTER to start a new
individual.  Extra keystrokes were eliminated on leaving input of
headers and individuals.  08/25/94.

Version 1.03.  Field descriptions for 1850 corrected.  10/29/1994

Version 1.04.  Status changed from shareware to freeware .
12/14/1994

Version 2.00.  Capability for the 1790-1840 censuses was added. 
02/26/1995

Version 2.01.  Background colors for 1850-1920 corrected. 
07/14/1995

Version 2.10.  Enhanced search capabilities and ability to merge
data files added to program.  09/07/1995

Enjoy!

Steve Martonak; 2204 B Viewtop Ln; Arlington TX 76012