Family Historian User Group

I'm thinking of upgrading to Version 6 but I'd like to know how much detail can be shown on the maps. Most of the people in my family tree come from a very small area and have never moved very far so is it possible to view individual streets within a village, for example? Many thanks.

Catherine

You can zoom in on the maps to street level in towns and villages, although I have found a few places in the countryside where small roads are missing from the map.

The main constraint is not the detail of the map but the amount of information you would need to include in every Place record. If, like many FH users, you record detail down to the level of town or village in the Place and then finer detail (house number or name and street name) in the address field, you won’t be able to distinguish every separate street location in the map. You would have to create a separate Place record for every separate street location. You would also then have to manually move the markers for each location to the exact spot you want on the map, because the geocoding software can only work down to village level.

For further discussion on this theme, see this topic: Places and Addresses - best practice (11868)

There is an alternative, Catherine.

You could try using my Map Life Facts Plugin that works with FH V5, so give it a try today.

It can create maps with markers using both Place and Address fields, and usually plots very well down to street and sometimes even house number. It has been available since Nov 2011!

So is V6 limited to mapping "Places" and not "Addresses"?

I'm trying to tidy up my Place records and was going to move all the street addresses to the "Addresses" field, but if they are no longer mapped, it doesn't seem like the best option.

The Edina software used by FH for geocoding can't map down to street level, so even if you leave the street information in the Place record you will probably find that all street addresses within the same town/village are plotted in the same spot on the map. You will then need to manually move the markers for them to distinguish between them on the map.

If you move the street information to the address field you will have a more manageable set of Places, and any notes you want to add about a town/village need only be added once, to the one Place record for that town/village.

If you want to produce maps with locations plotted to street level, Mike's Map Life Facts plugin, which he refers to above, can use both Place and Address fields to do that.

There are a few topics on this subject, try a search on place, this one in particular explores the issue:
Best format of PLACe and ADDRess for Map Geocoding (11937)

Check out the glossary:places|> Places and Addresses and there are links at the bottom to most recent Forum threads.