* Customize Place in the Property Box

[KarenWillard]

I'm an American TMG user, learning my way around FH. Something I have relied on in TMG is the way place information is broken down into individually labelled fields, so that as I do data entry, I am prompted to enter each piece of the place information in the appropriate field. Thus there is an address detail field, city/town field, a county field, a state/province field, country field and so on (going from the specific to the general). Is there a way for me to set up a similar entry protocol in FH? I like the discipline this has imposed on my place entering habits and would like to continue it in FH.

[jimlad68]

Even in TMG you could use the place fields anyway you wanted, I used the temple field as an abbreviation I could use instead of other fields which I then used in charts (trees) to reduce the space used. In respect of Gedcom it looks like you can use them anyway you want. They seem to be stored in GEDCOM (and exported by TMG in Gedcom) as 10 comma separated fields, so one thing to bear in mind is not to use, (commas) in any of your PLACe fields.

There are various posts in the FH forum re PLACe and ADDRess fields, they are worth looking up. Also this item gives the "norm" glossary:places|> Places and Addresses. I like to use just the 10 PLACe fields and use the ADDRess field as an abbreviation, but the standard seems to be to use PLACe for just City,County,State,Country with ADDRess for more detail of street etc, and this seems to be how the new MAP feature of FH works.

I agree is is good to keep the PLACe/ ADDRess structured, but this is easy to view/maintain via the Place/Address List. Just ensure you put your commas in the right place.

[tatewise]

In that glossary:places|> Places and Addresses advice there is a list of Forum Postings on the subject that discuss many of the pros and cons of different techniques. The most popular advice is to have a consistent number of comma separated part columns.

But to answer your specific question, there is no Place/Address entry protocol built into FH, but FH does 'auto-complete' recurring entries.

It is also possible to manage Place & Address details globally in Tools > Work with Data > Places & Addresses.