Family Historian User Group

Can anyone tell me how to populate the standard place name field in "Places" automagically? Is there some plugin, or other widget that will search the internet based on the place name values and return and populate the standard place name?

Welcome to the FHUG Rick.
I have moved this to the FH General Usage Forum because the User Group Forum is for help on using this web site.

I suspect you are talking about the Tools > Work with Data > Places command.
That is only populated from Place fields entered into your data in say the Place fields of each Fact.
It is a kind of index to Place names in your database, and differs in each Project.

May be you are talking about compiling a set of Place records as shown in the Records Window on the Places tab?

It is not clear where you were planning to obtain "the place name values" with which to search the Internet?

What were you hoping to achieve by the process requested?

Family history research can take you anywhere in the world, so how wide spread were you expecting the gazetteer of place names should be?

As a newcomer may I suggest you study our how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers and explore its links especially to the Documentation & Tutorials to become more familiar with FH.

Thanks for the quick reply Mike. I was primarily a TMG porer user for 20+ years and have been looking for a replacement since it closed its operation. Roots Magic 8 (after trying Legacy, GRAMPS, and others) was about to become my new program until I tried out FH 6 and liked what I saw. RM8 has the ability to automatically search a database (I believe they populated the data base) and return a standard place name value. I was looking for something along that line. We know that Canada, US, UK and other countries have "official" place name databases that are readily accessible but it is a tedious process when translating 10K place names to a standard place name using a manual method of fat-fingering the data. However, I am starting to get the impression that this has not been done in any meaningful way, and in fact, may not even be desirable given the geo-coding facilities of FH. So perhaps I will leave that issue for some future day.

I assume you have imported your TMG project into FH.
In which case the Tools > Work with Data > Places will list all your current Place names.

It is possible to Merge similar Place names to form a coherent set, or Edit any Place name such that all copies are changed together.

When entering new Place fields FH will offer to auto-complete using your existing Place names to help maintain that coherent set.

So eventually you will build up a standard set of Place names held in the Place Records, which you could also supplement from the Internet if you know of a suitable source, and that may be able to be automated by using a custom Plugin.

There is no list of "standard UK place names". We wouldn't even agree what should be in that list!

I worry that the US etc. lists are lists of jurisdictions, which isn't quite the same thing.

If you go to http://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html, follow the link to "Downloadable Names Files for Countries and Territories - FTP", you can download the file UK.ZIP, which contains a fair number of UK place names.

However (1) there seems a distinct lack of Welsh place names beginning "Morfa" and (2) while my home town of Crewe is in there, Crewe Green isn't, nor is Crewe-By-Farndon. So I'm not sure what the list is intended to contain - it may say elsewhere on the site. Worst problem is that I don't see a county in there....

(Updated from my previous response because, as usual, pressing <enter> triggered another thought).

Another thing to consider is the point of time which should be used for the standard! For example:

1. Warrington, being on the Lancashire/Cheshire border, has, over time, moved between the two. It even varies over the censuses!
2. Nearby Newton-le-Willows, used to called Newton in Makerfield.

Nice as it may seem to have a standard, I'm afraid it would be a case of only pleasing some, whilst displeasing others, with little chance of getting a consensus.