Family Historian User Group

I'm on a trial with FH7 and impressed so far - seriously considering moving from my current outdated software, despite the learning curve.
I have always entered my place names using the Chapman County Code for UK/IRL counties (LAN = Lancashire, MDX = Middlesex, etc), and usually enter as town/parish/village - county (Taunton SOM) or within larger towns and cities, sometimes with the church or suburb following (Liverpool St Peter LAN). This has the advantage of sorting by town or city rather than the smaller unit.
FH7 mapping works for some of these, but not all. I can't quite work out the rationale. Both large and small places map correctly (e.g. Southampton and Aisholt a village in Somerset), but some do not. The most logical thing I can see is that it maps correctly where the county code is the first three letters of the name (SOM and LAN) but not where it is less obvious (CUL for Cumberland and SSX for Sussex).
Is there any advice you can give me for getting it to work properly with the least amount of work (!) and for future place-name entries.

I have always used the format Town/Village, County, COUNTRY. I rarely have errors in mapping using that system.

You will find a great deal of correspondence on this forum regarding Place and Address fields. Some choose to use both fields with street addresses in the Address field. We choose to ignore the Address field and enter it all in Place as that works best for us. There are merits and demerits in doing it either way.

We originally used the Chapman County Code as well, but changed to full county names as they look much better in narrative reports and on our website. I think that people using our website who are not familiar with these codes would struggle to understand them, particularly those from other parts of the globe. I also try to avoid abbreviations as much as possible for the same reason.

For your information the structure we use is :-

Business/House name, Street address, Hamlet/part of a Town, City/Town/Village, County, Country

For the US and Canada we use :-

Business/House name, Street address, City/Town, County, State, Country

Where we have just a place for example entered as ,,, Town, County, Country FH ignores the 'blank columns' in reports and diagrams.

Auto mapping still doesn't find them all, for example Liverpool Street in Ipswich might map as Liverpool in Lancashire so we check each one carefully as it is created.

There is a useful tool in that you can reverse the column order so Country comes first, provided they all align.

Like a lot of things in FH it is a matter personal choice, but consistency is key.

One mistake that it is easy to make is to edit a Place or Address in the property box, this actually creates a new entry, so we always amend in the Places tab in the Records window.

I hope that helps.

I used Chapman codes extensively prior to keeping records on computer. Later, I stored the full parish, county, country, but FTM had the useful ability to use a predefined short form for reports, so Taunton, Somerset, England was output as Taunton SOM, for example.

I use the full version in FH, with reports using an abbreviated form, so Taunton, Somerset in this example. I still use Chapman codes for names of sources and media filenames. So a baptism source would be “Baptism Register, Taunton SOM: 1852 - Mary Jones”, with a similar file name for the image.

You can sort on any of the place name fields, so I have found that to be the best solution for FH.

Thank-you. Very helpful and informative advice!