Family Historian User Group

I have been searching through the historical posts and forgive me if I have missed an answer to this already but I have been working with my place names and addresses doing a bit if housekeeping and have come across situations where a parish is in different registration districts at different times and even a house can be in different civil parishes over the years as boundaries have changes.

I'm trying to work out the best way to maintain the authenticity of the place names whilst at the same time acknowledging that it is still the same place/ house the family is residing in.

I tend to organise in the following way:

Place: Civil Parish, County, Country (unless the UK then end with the county)
Address: Street address/farm/dwelling (where known), Civil Parish, County (for historical records)
Address: Street address, Parish/Suburb, Town, Post code, County (for modern records - county deliberately last)

Does anyone have any recommendations for any way to change my system or if the system is O.K. how to acknowledge that it is fundamentally the same place and the address has changed over time.

Also a second question on the same theme, how do you deal with "born at sea" when that is the only details provided.

Thanks in advance

1. You could use the 'Places' Tab to navigate to the various 'descriptions' of the same geographic place and edit them individually to complete the Standardized Place Name field. That standardized (modern) name will be used to get the same map co-ordinatesfor each variant of the place, but your differing place names will be used in reports etc.. You can also access the Places using the Toolbar 'Tools' > 'Work with Data' > 'Places...' (Why does a UK based product insist on using Americanisms, I wonder?)

2. Born at sea. I just tend to edit the individual narrative sentence for the birth/death when such events come to light, but you could also simply enter 'Sea' as the place, which would allow searching for such events. However, without some editing of event sentences any standard output would be nonsense, i.e. "X was born/died in Sea"

Mervyn

Regarding 1 there was a discussion a while back about how to include in a place record various ways of describing the same place - which might be relevant.

http://www.fhug.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=13142

David

Certainly you can go some way by using the Place records. For identical physical Places enter an identical Standardized modern name, then by sorting on that column you can bring all the historical names together for analysis, and the Standardized field would form the basis of geoplotting.

However, that does not help much with different Addresses that are the same house. For that you could perhaps have a Source Citation linked to each Fact using the variant Addresses, with an explanation of how you know they are all the same house.

For reasons similar to the above limitations, some users put the entire Address & Place details in the Place field and ignore the Address field. Then the solution in the first paragraph above can be applied to the full Address & Place.

susanpenter wrote:... Also a second question on the same theme, how do you deal with "born at sea" when that is the only details provided. ...

As more or less suggested above, I use "at sea" as the place-name and, if I know which ship, I record the name of the ship in the address. That way I can easily query all the born-at-sea people via the single place "at sea". (All one of them so far!)

Note that that idea may need tweaking if you normally include the place-name within the address.

Either way round, the sentence that would go forward into the narrative report, will probably need adjusting to read sensibly. (On a related note, I use "USA" as the country name where it is part of a multi-part name but for similar reasons of readability, the country on its own is "the USA". That way I don't need to adjust sentences for events like "She died in the USA" compared to "She died in California, USA".)