Family Historian User Group

Full place names (e.g. Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England) are great for removing ambiguity in external connections such as Ancestry/FMP hints, but they get a bit tedious seeing them repeatedly in printed trees and reports (as well as taking up a lot of space!).

Family Tree Maker had an option to store a short form name, such as "Wolverhampton, STS" for the example above, that looked much neater, but I can't see how to do this in FH. I'm sure it must be possible, but any steer on where to look please?

Thanks.

Mark

Mark, as a newcomer may I suggest you study how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers especially the documentation and tutorials to start with. Remember how long you took to master FTM and be patient with FH.

In Narrative Reports the default Option is to Use Short Form for Repeated Place Names so they get automatically truncated to Wolverhampton in your example after the first use.

In Diagrams you can customise the Text Scheme and choose a variety of default Place formats (Short, Medium, Tidy, Full). The default is Tidy that prunes redundant commas & spaces, but Short would show Wolverhampton, and Medium shows Wolverhampton, Staffordshire.

It should also be possible to define an abbreviated version using Chapman Codes as per your example.
That would employ a labelled Note in the Place records such as:
Abbreviation: Wolverhampton, STS
Then certainly in Diagrams, and may be in Reports, substitute the full name with the abbreviated name.
The former can be achieved with Expressions, and the latter with a Plugin.

Mark,
Although it is important to detail as much evidence as possible, I agree that in reports and diagrams it is easy to 'not see the wood for the trees'. My solution with diagrams/trees is:

- use PLACe for the full address (comma separated parts)
- create a short version of the address and put it in the ADDRess field
- I use PLACe in most reports
- I use (via text scheme e.g. attached) ADDRess and NOT PLACe for the address in Diagrams.

This extra action is not required but to save on manual updates and to keep some conformity I regularly:
- Delete all existing ADDResses (simple query, select and delete the ADDR column)
- Manually update then run the attached Plugin which copies PLACes to 'reduced' ADDResses.

When I export the data in say a Gedcom, I usually delete the ADDResses along with other extranious detail like named lists.

It might be possible to create a similar result in reports with fact sentences.