Best Practice: Places & Locations

[gracielou 0]

I'm cleaning up my Places and am interested to know how people handle places and locations.

For example, a birth can happen at a location such as General Hospital at a place such as, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States.

In the past I've sometimes combined the location & place in the Place field in my software program, such as:

• General Hospital, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States

 Other times I've entered just the place:

• Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States

And then I've entered the location info (General Hospital) in the notes of the event.

I'm curious to know how others handle this and if there is a best practice for this. It seems to make sense and be easier to combine the two in TNG, especially if you're mapping events. But I could also argue that place should just be city/county/state/country.

 

 

[theKiwi 0]

I generally put as much as I know into the place field, including a street address, or hospital, or cemetery.

This does not always work well for softwares that insist every place have 4 levels in it separated by 3 commas, but it works for me in my Reunion software, and in TNG.

The big benefit you get from this is that when you look at a map of say Chicago, instead of just one pin for Chicago, potentially representing hundreds of people and hundreds of events at many locations, you'd see a map of Chicago dotted with pins that identify all the different places that things happened within the city of Chicago.

Roger

[Katryne 0]

Generally, I enter 3 items in the location : city, administrative subdivision, country. Sometimes (seldom) I add the hamlet or the citi district.

And I choose today's names for the locations to make the automatic geolocation easier.

Everything else in notes.

[Rob Roy 0]

I use city, administrative subdivision, country as well, though I modify it per country. The key is can the reader find where it happened.  Therefore I use the modern name.  In cases where most of the references use an outdated name, I will list the city as "Constantinople (now Istanbul).

As for locations within a city or town such as hospitals and addresses, I use the agency field and the Address fields. 

Note: I do not transfer data between different software packages.

[Rob Roy 0]

I also am in the very early stages of adding a button in the Place Notes Field that links to the Wikipedia article about the Place.   Here is an example for Athol, Massachusetts.

<form action="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athol,_Massachusetts"><input type="submit" value="Wikipedia - Athol, Massachusetts" /></form>  On the map if you click on the pin the following is displayed:

[gracielou 0]

I wish there were a Like button for all these great responses. Thank you!