You can run it alongside Family Historian whenever you're doing genealogy research. As you start typing the name of a place, we show you a list of known places that look as if they might be the one you want... It's highlighted if it already appears in your family tree. When the list is short enough, click on your place in the list. We copy the name to Windows clipboard so you can just right-click on your family tree and paste it in.
If we know the location of the place you will see a pin in a small map of Great Britain so you can make a judgement about whether this is indeed the place you're looking for, and you can click the Go to button to go to the Ordnance Survey map in Streetmap.co.uk at the selected place where you can see where the church was, and even the names of farmhouses in rural areas.
When you've selected a place name, we can show you a list of the addresses recorded in your family tree for this place. You can select one of them and paste it in, or add a new one.
To help you look up BMDs and censuses, and to help confirm the identity of the people you've found, we can also tell you the civil parish if it has a different name, the registration district, what other places we know of that were in that district, and even guess the district if it's a new place name and you tell us where it is by clicking on the map.
In fact, even if you don't use it to enter place names and addresses into your family tree, Toponymy is useful as an index by place name to the registration districts (including places that weren't civil parish names), as an index using historic counties rather than modern administrative regions to the Ordnance Survey maps, and to highlight mis-spelt and alternative place names in your tree. It comes with extensive notes on how to get the most out of it and how it works, but you should be able to use the basic functionality effectively without having to read much more than a few paragraphs under Getting Started.
The program is supplied freely and without any guarantees. You can download it here: Toponymy Version 2.2
If your system opens the zip folder automatically, just double click Setup.exe, otherwise first extract the 3 files into a temporary folder and then run Setup. If it asks if you want to overwrite your system files, always say no. It should work anyway.
It has been installed and run successfully on Windows XP(SP2) and Vista, but I'm not planning to worry about any earlier Windows versions.
If you have any problems with the installation, with the program, or with the information it contains, please get in touch with me. If you would like to contribute towards its content, whether with information about place names and their locations (theres nothing like local knowledge), or by adding plug-in functions (possibly a link to your favourite mapping system), or just suggestions, Id love to hear from you.
Chris Bowyer
