Family Historian User Group

I have upgraded to v6 and find that while some of the locations appear in the right place in the Map window others are wrong. I can't see how to easily edit the position?

For example: Born in Sutton, Surrey the map view has the position pointer in Effingham, some 12 miles away.

I would ideally like to be able to drag the pointer to the right position on the map but it doesn't seem to allow this.

Any ideas?

Nick

As explained in the Help (e.g. press F1), you need to activate Enable Marker Dragging (right-hand button on Map-window toolbar).

The last toolbar button (it is red) can be clicked to enable marker dragging.

Thanks, I should have spotted that in the menu.

I wonder why it got the wrong position to start with?

The data that is used to look-up the locations isn't great (but better services would have been too expensive for Calico Pie I suspect). So it very often can't match the place and instead puts the pin in one place to represent the county. I think you'll find that anywhere unknown in Surrey is always mapped just to the east of Effingham and actually you may have several markers on top of each other there if you have a lot of Surrey ancestors (I have this issue in Lancashire).

I am planning to update my Map Life Facts Plugin to work with Place Records and supplement the FH geocoding with the Google Geocoding that usually works a lot better but is only free for low frequency personal use.

In a recent bulletin Calico Pie said they plan to set up a process by which poorly geocoded places can be reported through them to Edina.

Part of the problem is that more places than you would expect have shifted counties over the past 150 or so years. A whole chunk of Suffolk moved to Norfolk in the 19th Cent and the southern part of Lancashire moved to Cheshire. And of course Westmoreland and Cumberland no longer exist and the new Cumbria includes a large piece of northern Lancashire. So if, like me, you prefer to record the historic county (Woolwich will forever be in Kent!) then any geocoding software will need to be pretty clever to sort out all the possibilities. On top of that we love our Newports (Monmouthshire, Isle of Wight, Essex or is it Cambridgeshire, and so on) that seem to pop up all over the place. Finally, of course, place name spelling is highly variable and can swing back and forth depending on the whim of the local authorities - whither Haringey (the Borough) or Harringay (the place)?

NickH wrote: For example: Born in Sutton, Surrey the map view has the position pointer in Effingham, some 12 miles away.

Sutton seems to be an odd one. As Nick Walker has said, the geocoding service which FH is using tends to place unrecognised UK place names in the approximate centre of the county if one is given. Often this is because the place is now in a different administrative county to the one in your database (e.g. Sutton is now a London Borough). It is often possible to see what the geocoding service expects by typing the place name into the search bar immediately above the map. But this doesn't seem to help with Sutton. It might have been expected that since Sutton is a London Borough, this might be what is expected.

In an email on the FHU mailing list, Simon Orde indicated that Calico Pie will be setting up a reporting system for geocoding errors. See last paragraph of http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/t ... 1418302163

Sutton would seem to be a prime candidate for reporting.

Derek

That is why each Place Record has a Standardized field and my Plugin has a Substitute field that allows you to enter the modern equivalent Place name that geocoders will recognise.

I doubt if online geocoders will ever take account of historic Place names. They are primarily designed for people to find their way in the modern world. I suspect the Family History market is too small to interest them.

It is for the above reasons that I use modern postcodes in Place/Address fields for historic locations so that they can be pinpointed on modern maps and with online geocoders.

delwoodman wrote:..., the geocoding service which FH is using tends to place unrecognised UK place names in the approximate centre of the county if one is given.
Derek

happens with countries too - I have one entry simply as "Denmark". As the mapping includes Greenland as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it reckons the centre of Denmark is actually somewhere on the south-east coast of Greenland. Understandable, and easily "corrected"

I have just installed V6 on my Vista based computer.

The Map Window - TimeSlider pointers and dates do not display, however, clicking at the extreme RH end, ie today, and dragging left, moves an, invisible marker as evidence by the disappearance of place markers on the map.
Have any other users met this problem? I know the TimeSlider works fine on a Windows 8.1 machine.

V6 on Windows 7 here, and the time slider on mine has no scale markings, and dragging left and right moves some very faint small dots along above the grey time bar. Some markers appear and disappear as I drag.

I don't know what I'm supposed to be seeing!

I have windows 7 - I attach a shot of the screen showing missing pointer and dates. Changing size of window has no affect.

David Keetch

Do you have a Windows zoom function set? Your text seems very large for the window? Here is mine on Windows 7

My Vista Map window has no Time Slider at all. Beta was OK.

[EDIT] Sorry, it was not chosen via button or Map menu, so OK now.

I am using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and it looks fine on my computer.

Bill

I could not see a time slider on mine (win7), but after I ticked Time slider from the Map dropdown it came on.

Nice feature, must check it out, I like the drag both sliders together to show movement by year.

Mine looks exactly like DJKeetch's above. I did have the Windows Display size set to Medium (125%) but have tried resetting it to Smaller (100%) made no difference to the slider (just the screens are all too hard for my eyes to read now!).

I don't have any zoom - I made the window small before making the snip - but changing the size of the window doesn't help