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Best Practice Recommendations for Maintaining Places Table


bueccd

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I am curious to hear from some power users on how they are maintaining their places table.  I have a smaller family tree that I have only had time to dabble in from time to time.  I had started by transcribing a Great Aunt's family history from paper into a genealogy program called Brother's Keeper.  But I converted to TNG when I found that it was easier for quick access anywhere I had internet access.  Now as I go back and try to clean up my places to bring some consistency I cannot decide if I want to define places for particular street addresses or not.  I would like to hear how others in the community approach the maintenance of their places.

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My preference is to include the address as part of the place. That way

123 Some street, Some town, some county, some state, some country

is a different place from 

125 Some street, Some town, some county, some state, some country

Roger

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I try to keep to 3 levels : town, administrative zone (département, county, state, district ...), Country. 

With today's name so that geocoding can be easy and automatic.

Details are in a note attached to the event : parish, hamlet, address, ancient name or city.

For a place very much in use, I may add a 4th level in front of the classic 3, for the hamlet or the parish.

My way of managing places is a problem when cousins send me a gedcom : I have to correct every place so that it fits my standards.

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bobbyfamilytree
9 hours ago, theKiwi said:

My preference is to include the address as part of the place. That way

123 Some street, Some town, some county, some state, some country

is a different place from 

125 Some street, Some town, some county, some state, some country

Roger

I do it like this.

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Thank you @theKiwi Two follow ups if you don't mind and I'll use some local examples for you and I. 

1. What do you use if the addresses have changed?  For example, in our area, Grand Rapids changed their addressing schema in 1912.  Do you use the current equivalent and place the "old" address that you will find in the historical records in a note?  Or how about schools (and similar) if they had moved like the Comstock Park High School my ancestors attended is now the present location of that school district's middle school.  I've considered creating two places and labeling one as new and the other as old.  

2. If I were to share portions of my tree with another by creating a Gedcom file, how does the places / addresses show in that export file?

Thanks again,

Chris

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Grand Rapids eh - I'm in Caledonia :-)

1 - Always use the address/place name as it was at the time of the event. This means you can find records for it at the time that matters. If you wanted to you could put the fact that in 1912 the street number changed into a note. Same applies for things like places in what is now West Virginia. Before 1863 that was "Virginia", so you wouldn't list a birth that took place in say 1858 as being in West Virginia. Even further back in time there's a clear cutoff as to when the United States came into being. Before that events didn't happen in the United States - they might have happened in British Colonial America, or in North America, but not the United States.

2 - the places show in a GEDCOM file just as you have entered them, so if you include the Street address in the place name field, that will be exported in the GEDCOM file. What someone else's software does with it isn't so certain - eg some software tries to shoehorn places into 4 fields, so if you have got to 5 fields, I'm not sure what will happen.

Roger

 

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I have the same workflow as Roger (including addresses in the place field), but I use the modern/current names. That way it is easier to group people who lived in the same place. TNG will consider Lambeth, Surrey (pre 1965) and Lambeth, London (post 1965) as two different places while they are the same. I don't like several different places referring to the same, my goal is to group them.

The "original name" is mentioned in either the place description or the citation's transcription.

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Thanks @theKiwi and @fluffy82 these are good points to keep in mind as I clean up my Places database.  I really appreciate it.

Another thing I have noticed that is related to places.  I can see in media where you can attach a picture to a place.  So for example, I have a picture of the church in our town where my family has traditionally attended since the late 1800s.  But I cannot make or edit that link if I start from within the Places tables.  And also, if I make a link to a photo for a place, I do not see anywhere in my tree where that place photo is displayed when looking up up a person or family with events tied to that place.  Is that a setting I am missing somewhere?  And also, here's an idea: I love the events map that shows pins for each place you have coordinates listed.. but it seems like it would be even better if there were thumbnail pics under the map of the pics with the associated places.  Perhaps @Darrin Lythgoe can speak to these questions as well.

Kindly yours,

Chris

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This thread demonstrate that there cannot be ONE best practice. There seems to be as many practises as there are users. And each with his good reasons, different according to experience, use, purpose, country, etc.

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