* Places and Addresses

[wildbill]

I am relatively new to FH, searching this group for previous discussions and adding my comment rather than fragmenting, I hope this is the FH way, if not please correct me?

Firstly I believe the Address, Building or Site being part of the Place field only confuses the Place designation and reduces the possibility of grabbing online hints, therefore I jumped at separate notations in my previous program.

Example;
Harrington Street 3rd Presbyterian Church, Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry is less concise than
Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry

Also in the first instance I would have numerous Places containing Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry whereas in the second I would have only one Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry in my Place List and numerous Sub Divisions, to me that is perfectly logical and the way any street or other directory would work.

My disappointment with the FH Address is that it is not relational to the Place so in Tools--Work with Data--Addresses Greenlawn Cemetery could be anywhere and there are many. The problem highlighted by the original poster is not being able to add a photo of Harrington Street 3rd Presbyterian Church, geocode the Church and add some notes describing the Church history. Those current limitations mean I cannot effectively Map a City and see the Sites within that City and I cannot naturally view all events which took place in said Church.

I came from Rootsmagic because I find FH superior in the genuine research needs which matter to me and help me drive my research forward, sadly I still use Rootsmagic 7 to maintain this important Site data which has become an important resource in itself. I am aware Heredis provides support for relational sub divisions and I believe Legacy Family Tree does also so I remain hopeful FH will close this gap and provide me with a clean break from previous data entry methods.

[tatewise]

I think in this case there is little that links your points with Attach Images to Places or Addresses (15279) in a 5-year-old thread, so I have started a new thread. A potential complication of continuing old threads too long is that features get updated so the discussion in an old thread may no longer be relevant and very long threads may be difficult to comprehend. If necessary, hyperlinks can be added to new threads that refer to other threads by using the * against the Topic Title as explained in the Forum Usage Guide (4252).

Your summary is essentially the same as the FHUG Knowledge Base article Working with Places and Addresses.
Yes, it is disappointing that Address fields are not better associated with Place fields.
See Wish List Ref 527 Add Media and other data to Address fields that you can Vote for and requests features similar to your needs.

Have you specific examples where combining address & place in one Place field reduces the possibility of grabbing online hints?

[ColeValleyGirl]

I'm not a fan of online hints, but have no shortage of them, in spite of using the Place field to hold both Address and Place. Perhaps it's different in different geographies? My ancestors and their descendants are mostly in England and Wales, with a few in Canada, USA and New Zealand.

[BillH]

The problem highlighted by the original poster is not being able to ... geocode the Church .... .

Have you tried the plugin Map Life Facts? It has an option to geocode the combination of address and place. I use this to map the location of churches, cemeteries, etc. The resulting geocode is not stored in FH, but is accessible in the plugin.

Not sure if this would help you or not.

Bill

[tatewise]

Good advice Bill but is covered in FHUG KB Working with Places and Addresses under Distinct Places and Addresses, etc, as mentioned earlier.

[BillH]

I just wasn't sure if he had actually seen that or had tried the plugin yet to see how it works.

[wildbill]

Have you specific examples where combining address & place in one Place field reduces the possibility of grabbing online hints?

Thank you for the edit of the thread and for the pointers for further reading.

I did try combining Site and Place in Rootsmagic in preparation for transition to FH, I did this in a copy database and compared side by side with the original. I did notice differences in the hint count so it would appear the combined Place string is less conducive to obtaining hints which I can understand.

Really a user becomes more reliant on fuzzy logic as my Harrington Street 3rd Presbyterian Church, Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry is someone else's 3rd Presbyterian Church (Harrington Street), Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry whereas the Anytown, Anycounty, Anycountry remains the same.

Thanks also to the other users who took time to comment.

[tatewise]

Maybe the reduced number of hints is due to the additional names in the combined Place filtering out some 'impossible' hints, which is useful as it narrows the search.

I wonder where RootsMagic obtains its hints?