Family Historian User Group

Hi Mike,

I am thinking about changing the way I use address and place. I thought as you have put a lot of time into working out how you use them that maybe you could help me with a few questions.

Today for address I usually have just one part, the house number and street name. Sometimes I also have a second part which is either an apartment number or a PO Box number. Sometimes I have just a building name like "Trinity Church". So, some examples of what I have today would look like this:

123 Main Street
Main Street 123
456 Main Street, Apt. 123
PO Box 678
789 Main Street, PO Box 987
Trinity Church
Trinity Church, 432 Main Street
Johnson Company, 834 Grand Street, Suite 9999, Box 1341

For place what I have varies by country. In the US I have either City, County, State, USA or Township, County, State, USA. In Norway I have Farm, Local Parish, Parish, County, Norway. In other countries I typically have three parts or four parts. Examples would be:

Kirkland, King County, Washington, USA
Hay River Township, Dunn County, Wisconsin, USA
Ebna, Skånevik, Skånevik, Hordaland, Norway
Hoyerhagen, Hanover, Niedersachsen, Germany
Rimbey, Alberta, Canada

What I really want to do is to have the address contain what it does currently (although in a more structured format) followed by the place. For example.

Trinity Church, 432 Main Street, Hay River Township, Dunn County, Wisconsin, USA
Johnson Company, 834 Grand Street, Suite 9999, PO Box 1341, Kirkland, King County, Washington, USA

So, for the definition of the parts for the address in the US, I'm thinking maybe I would define them as:

building name, street name including number, apartment or suite name, PO Box number, city or township, county, State, USA

For other countries they would vary slightly as mentioned above. I see from your previous postings that you do something similar. So, I have a few questions.

Do you see any potential problems with this? I'm hoping to avoid getting down the road aways and realizing I've not planned it out well.

Do you put the place into the address field even if you have no other address information? For example, would you put Kirkland, King County, Washington, USA into the address AND place fields even if you had no building name, street number, etc?

Also, tied in with the previous question, how do you handle sentences in reports? I'm guessing you only display the address and not the place. Or do you display the address and place and suppress the place if the address isn't blank? I have most of my sentences set set to show "at address in place" so that it works pretty well if I have only an address, only a place, or both. With the new structure I'm thinking of using, it really doesn't look right if I use "at address" if all I have is place information in the field. Also using "in address" doesn't read very well.

In Map Life Facts I currently use [Address]...Place. Do you use Address Fields Only? Looking back at my previous question, if you don't put the place info into the address field if all you have is place info, what option would you use in Map Life Facts to get all your addresses/places mapped?

And lastly, I'm dreading trying to manually enter my place information into all my address fields. Could a plugin be written which would take the place information and append it to whatever is already in the address field? I'd have to go in first and standardize all my addresses.

No hurry on answering all these questions. I've been thinking about this for months and haven't been able to decide if this would work or not so waiting a bit longer is no problem. I'd really appreciate your input before I proceed.

Thanks,

Bill

After posting I realized I should probably not have posted this to just Mike. I really would appreciate any help and advice anyone might have on my questions.

Thanks,
Bill

Have you seen these two old threads?
Place and Address References (9142)
Correct usage of 'Place' and 'Address' (6658)

Peter,

I did see the second one. It seemed like what I was proposing fit in with what was being said there. I had not seen the first one. That seems like a bit more than what I really need, but will look into it further.

Thanks,
Bill

The vast majority of my locations are in the UK so that biasses my structure.
Place has 3 columns:
1 = UK Registration District/Church Parish
2 = Jurisdictional County
3 = Country
Address has 7 columns:
1 = Building/Church/House Name
2 = Building/Flat/Apartment Number
3 = Street/Road
4 = Village/District
5 = Town/London Borough
6 = County
7 = Postcode [plus modern AKA names] to assist Geocoding

The main reason for those columns is to assist sorting in Tools > Work with Data.
Often I have similar Addresses, but some have no building name or number, but others have multiple numbers, but if all in same Street they sort together.
The chosen columns bring all nearby Addresses together by sorting on the appropriate Column.

I do NOT duplicate the Place in the Address.
However, the County in both is often the same, but not always.
In the UK, the jurisdictional (Place) County can be different from the postal (Address) County, especially on the outskirts of large cities such as London.
For example, I was raised in Ilford which is in Greater London, but its postal address is Ilford, Essex.
(Essex is one of the UK 'Home Counties' that surround London.)

In Map Life Facts I use the [Address]…[Place] option so either field can be blank.

In Reports it would look unusual if the Place was replicated in the Address. I usually do not include the Fact Address option in Narrative Reports mainly because it does not read well.

Mike,

Here in the US there is really no difference between county and jurisdictional county and we don't have registration district. Church parish probably exists, but isn't in common use for any type of addressing or placement of places.

So, if I were to use a similar approach, it seems like I would want the city, county, and state in the address field so the only thing in the place field would be the country. I'm not sure that is what I would want to do.

Also, I really want the address to show in reports so I'd have to figure that out as well. For example, for a marriage I really want to have it show the name of the church and where the church is, etc.

As for geocoding, if you have both an address and a place for a fact then you might be geocoding something like this:

Building, Building Number, Street, Town, County, Postcode [plus modern AKA names], UK Registration District, Jurisdictional County, Country

Does the geocoding work correctly with all that information? It doesn't cause problems to have two county names and to have all that information following the postcode?

I obviously need to think about this some more.

Thanks!

Bill

Bill,

You'll give yourself an enormous headache (if you haven't already).

Old Proverb: For this question there are many answers; and all of them are as right/wrong as you want them to be!

For what it's worth, my general approach is:

Place:
UK: Village/Town/City (as appropriate), County, Country
US and Others: Village/Township (or whatever), City (if necessary), County/Administrative District, State (if appropriate), Country -
all of which can usually be pinpointed on a 'normally' scaled historical/modern road map, and will certainly be found on Google Maps etc.

Address:
House/Building identity, Street (if appropriate), District/Locality (if appropriate) - for which you would historically need a large scale local/town/city map.

Post Codes/Zip Codes are largely irrelevant, as they are a relatively modern invention, but if known I follow the individual Country's convention. In the UK, for example, it comes after County, or after City if there is no County.

As indicated, this all started pre-SATNAV days, as did my Family History!

Mervyn

Mervyn,

Thanks for the reply.

What you are doing is very similar to what I have.

One thing I really hate is that if I use Tools > Work with Data > Addresses... it lists the addresses, but there is no way to know where they are. For example, if I have multiple Trinity Church addresses there is no way to tell if it is the one in Kirkland or Bellevue, or where ever. I know I can generate a list in a query or plugin, but that doesn't allow me to update the address and it is no where near as useful.

Oh well... maybe some day FH will offer something like Tools > Work with Data > Addresses/Places... where it combines the address and place in one list.

Thanks,
Bill

There is no problem including both the Place and Address field in Reports. It just isn't worded very well in Narrative Reports. Also you cannot opt to omit the Place. Which particular Reports interest you most?

Geocoders don't seem to mind much about the order of the location fields. If there is a Post/Zip-code in the middle, and a Country near the end, they seem to cope well, and don't mind duplication.

The point about including enough in the Address columns to differentiate otherwise similar locations is well made.
Apart from helping with geocoding, that is another benefit of having a Post/Zip-code column, even for ancient locations.

One overriding consideration is to ensure the number of Columns is the same in every Place and likewise in every Address, even if that means blank columns. This ensures that sorting on any Column including Reverse Display Order in Tools > Work with Data is always consistent.

However, I would strongly advise you wait a few months before making a final decision!!!!

What you can easily do is experiment with the FH Sample Project and try out all the Reports, Work with Data, etc.

Mike,

Thanks for the reply. There isn't a particular report. I'm still coming to grips with the different reports and how they would work given whatever scheme I end up with. I'm sure I won't make a decision anytime soon... I've been thinking about this for about a year and am very good at procrastinating.

If I end up duplicating the place information in the address field, then it is going to look strange when I use both adddress and place anywhere. As I mentioned above, I don't want to have just the country in the place field and everything else in the address field. I may just stick with what I have and hope FH comes out with a better Work with Data > Addresses/Places... option at some point. I really think address and place should be better linked together in FH. The address is really meaningless without the associated place.

I am going to decide on a consistent set of parts for my addresses and will convert what I have today so that whatever I decide on in the future should be easier to convert to.

Thanks for all your help.

Bill

My advice would be not to duplicate. Ever. So that means that the Place components would never go into the Address. Mike's scheme works for him because he's not using the Place bits for the same purpose as the Address bits, hence they don't duplicate.

As for the business about not knowing which Holy Trinity is which (it's all of them of course), yes it's a bit of a pain if you need to alter some of your Holy Trinity to Holy Trinity & All Saints (say) but I think there's a where-used query that lets you see all the data in the facts so you can work out which is which. I think. ...

Adrian,

Thanks for the reply. While what you say is true, I think it would be much nicer if I could edit the address in the Work with Data > Addresses... dialog. After all, isn't that one of its functions! I can't edit the address there if I can't figure out which one is which. Today I have to handle it the way you suggest which is kind of a pain.

Bill

BillH wrote:... I can't edit the address there if I can't figure out which one is which. Today I have to handle it the way you suggest which is kind of a pain...

I sympathise - I suspect that the writers and testers didn't twig that some of us use Place and Address in the way we do. It's an understandable mistake since the GEDCOM Standard is quite clear that duplication should appear in the Address as the later parts seem identical to the Place. I suspect it's one of those instances where the Standard wasn't thought through - it makes sense where it's an Address of a Repository, because there's no Place item there. It doesn't make sense where there's a Place and an Address together.