John Cardinal, owner of FamilyHistoryHosting.com, is well-known within the genealogy community. He has written several software products that add extra functionality to existing products that appeal to genealogists.

John has now upodated the Online Repository Assistant, or ORA for short. It is an automated software assistant for use with the U.S. census records when using online repositories including Ancestry, FamilySearch, and others.

ORA combines a Windows program with a web browser extension to extract data and streamline your use of popular online services. The browser extension is compatible with Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera.

Rather than my writing about ORA, I will refer you to an article that John wrote at: https://ora-extension.com/en/article-ora-and-1950census.htm. It provides a detailed explanation of both the purpose of ORA as well as instructions about how to use it.

"It's frustrating to use the search page for the 1950census.archives.gov site. The AI-generated name index leaves a lot to be desired compared to transcriptions created manually. To be fair, it's a difficult problem to solve with technology alone. Unfortunately, there are issues with the implementation of the search results page that exacerbate the challenges with the name index. ORA alleviates some of those issues."

You can read much, much more at: https://ora-extension.com/en/article-ora-and-1950census.htm

For even more information, see the Introduction slideshow or see the help pages.

ORA is sold as a subscription service, $24 USD per year.