* Mapping - existing, Map Facts, and Google Earth

[davidf]

Ah, the problems of how "Officialdom" Administratively (in its multitude of flavours) divides up the country - presumably so they can "geo-code" in their own way!

When my father died, the registrar asked where he was born. I replied "92 Finchley Road, Hampstead" ("Hampstead in the County of London" was printed in bold across the top of his Birth Certificate). "Oh, no", she replies, "that's Camden". (In which case since 92 Finchley Road is now the Odeon Cinema, I guess he was also "born in the stalls"?)

I try to record the address from the source on the face of the fact in the place and address fields, but this is a case of asking "which hierarchy?" Particularly in the UK.

The Registrars' Administrative Hierarchy will be Registration district and Sub Registration district then possibly an address off the detail of the form. Sometimes they will add a county based on the majority county of the Registration District - I seem to remember Grantham RD spans multiple counties - but I have never had cause to actually get a certificate to see what is actually printed on them. This Hierarchy is my final fall back.

There is then the Council Hierarchy - which used to be District, County, Country - but County Boroughs (like Bristol, Newcastle etc?) seemed not to want to fit and you end up with Locality, County Borough, Country (e.g. Byker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK).

We tend to have an idea of our Postal Hierarchy (so we would know whether it was East or West Sussex), but that is a "chubby" hierarchy with detail the GPO never used (Post Town was meant to trump county, even if your post town was in a different county). The introduction of postcodes of course makes most of the detail superfluous - when they first tried to promote them in the 1970s I wrote to a "Street Number and a Postcode" - took them a fortnight to work it out - according to the delivery postman, neither the "posted postal district" nor the "delivery postal district" where mechanised so the letter had to be sent via Croydon!

We also tend to have our Personal Hierarchy - which we may enter on forms. Is our village "free standing within the county" or is it a suburb of a town? Does our "parish" (civil or ecclesiastical) have any relevance if it does not match the name of a settlement? And which county "do we feel we are in"?

Cleveland was a god-forsaken county - it seemed that only County Hall and the Police recognised it. I gave my proper postal address to a major bookshop in London that was going to send a book to me - and of course it was delivered via the city in Ohio many weeks later - so I dropped "Cleveland" and just went with locality, post-town, postcode - even though the locality was in a different pre-1974/1965 county to the post-town.

If I only know the Registration District, I enter the registration district (e.g. "Hampstead Registration District") as the first part of my place record and leave the rest blank. But if I can get an unambiguous address from the source (e.g. "92 Finchley Road, Hampstead", I tend to enter a "Personal Hierarchy" place in the place field (taking account of when the event happened). So, my father died in "Farnham, Surrey", Not "Surrey South West" - whatever the registrar says!

Many of my address+place entries were recorded before I had "standardised place" available. So what hierarchy to enter in that field? If in doubt I tend to use whatever Wikipedia says the hierarchy was for that point in time (usually District/Borough, County, Country) - and I pick up the latitude and longitude from the same Wikipedia page - and you can click through to see how that lat,long maps.

[Mark1834]

I have a couple of certificates from the Caxton Registration District, and that is in the “Counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon”.

I’ve also had issues in the past with Erpingham Registration District in Norfolk. Many of my ancestors came from the village of Erpingham, and that is one mile outside the Registration District, and is actually in Aylsham...

[LornaCraig]

So, my father died in "Farnham, Surrey".....

Ah yes, Farnham…. As a postal town it encompasses several villages, including Rowledge. The majority of Rowlegde falls within Surrey, its postal address is ‘Rowledge, Farnham’ and the whole village has a Surrey Postcode. But the village and ecclesiastical parish (created in the 19th century, so relatively new in UK terms) straddle the Surrey-Hampshire border. Some of the houses are in Hampshire, so they are in the civil parish of Binstead, pay their council tax to Hampshire and have their bins emptied on a different day of the week.

The church and primary school are also in Hampshire. The school accepts pupils from the whole village. But most of the children living in Rowledge were born in Surrey (at the hospital in Guildford), so when they approach school age their parents get a letter from the Surrey education department asking why they don’t appear to have registered their child for school…

[Mark1834]

Remember the case of Chester City FC? Their turnstiles and car park are in England, but the pitch and toilets in Wales. During Covid lockdowns, they had to follow the more severe Welsh lockdown rules (50 people max, but unlimited in England at the time!).

[davidf]

The majority of Rowledge falls within Surrey, its postal address is ‘Rowledge, Farnham’ and the whole village has a Surrey Postcode. But the village and ecclesiastical parish (created in the 19th century, so relatively new in UK terms) straddle the Surrey-Hampshire border.

This is one of the places where I am unhappy with the "fixed number of parts" of the Place Field.

If you lived in Rowledge your postal address was indeed ‘Rowledge, Farnham, Surrey', but how far out of Rowledge did you have to live on the Boundstone Road before, you ceased to be "Rowledge"? Estate Agents seem to have their own hierarchy here!

Eventually you would cease to be "Rowledge, Farnham, Surrey" and become just "Farnham, Surrey". The Post Office however insists that you are "Wrecclesham, Farnham, Surrey" - even though to most in the area Wrecclesham is a village "over the hill". The Estate Agents would probably say "Bounstone, Farnham, Surrey", or possibly "The Bourne, Farnham, Surrey", - The Bourne being an ecclesiastical parish, which Boundstone isn't. Some Estate Agents even use "South Farnham" (i.e. privet hedges & gravel drives) - but that is a bit like calling Battersea, "South Chelsea"!

The point is over a distance of about a mile you switch from 4 part place naming "Rowledge, Farnham, Surrey, England" to 3 part "Farnham, Surrey, England" and then back to 4 part when you really get to "The Bourne"!

My workaround is to put the "Village" - Rowledge or The Bourne or even Wrecclesham - in the address field at the end - but it feels "wrong" - Rowledge is a place. (South Farnham isn't).

(It feels even more wrong when the village is clearly well detached from the post-town - like Millbridge just south-east of Rowledge but an address like:
FH Address:
Millbridge Garage, Frensham Road
FH Place:
Frensham, Farnham, Surrey
(GU10 3AB)
just feels like a complete mess not even recognising Millbridge - and even worse if you relegate Frensham to the address field.)

Perhaps I should in such circumstances just say to hell with the post town and go with "Rowledge, Surrey, England" (even when it is Hampshire - I'm told in the local pub supporters of Hampshire Cricket sit one end of the bar and Surrey supporters at the other end.)? Likewise "Millbridge, Surrey, England"?

Properly parsing the place name is however important when it comes to wanting to sort your places. Should I go full 4 part and prefix most places with a comma when they don't have a "locality/village"?

Perhaps (at least for UK) places we could do with a (configurable) "helper" (a bit like the date helper) which could prompt you for "Village", "Post-town", "County", "Country" and depending on what you filled in (can auto-fill still work in this scenario?) then appropriately comma delimit the contents of the place field?

For the standardised place field how much of a stretch would it be to have a feature that could connect to an online gazetteer? And which ones?

Do more "modern countries" (e.g. Australia, Canada, US etc.) not have this problem because as they were settled a "township/county/state/country" type hierarchy was imposed? What happens with big metro-counties in the US? (I notice Miami-Dade is termed by Wikipedia as a "Two-tier federation")

[LornaCraig]

Estate Agents seem to have their own hierarchy here!

[AdrianBruce]

I have a couple of certificates from the Caxton Registration District, and that is in the “Counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon”. ...

That's curious - I thought that the GRO had created Registration Counties (yes, another sort of county) expressly so a Registration District was entirely within a single Registration County. See https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/index.html and in particular:

Registration county - (many districts crossed county boundaries, but were classed wholly in one county for registration and census purposes).

The tables accessible from that URL do put Caxton RD in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire but I had presumed that the County column was referring to the geographic / administrative county. So quite why the certificate gives the two names, I don't understand...

[AdrianBruce]

... This is one of the places where I am unhappy with the "fixed number of parts" of the Place Field. ...

As I've said, I don't use the fixed number of parts principle, essentially for three reasons:

• I can't decide whether the empty bit at the front should be comma-space or space-comma-space - and the one time I tried it, my muscle memory was all over the place, leading to ...
• Auto-fill is no help in prompting me whether there's a leading space, since auto-fill needs the matching arrangement to suggest anything. Or it did when I tried it.
• I like the ability to be flexible over how many parts I use - I stuck an extra level into my German place-names when it came to Prussia, in order to record the Prussian provinces. Conversely Hamburg was a city-state for which "Hamburg, Germany" suffices, thank you!

... Perhaps I should in such circumstances just say to hell with the post town ...

I have studiously ignored the post town stuff. The Royal Mail can insist all it likes that Alsager is in Stoke-on-Trent, with an ST post-code, but if you look on any map, it's in Cheshire (or Cheshire East). (Bear in mind that I reconcile my place-names and addresses on input so that I can print a report immediately, without the bother of reconciling before output.) If a source has a postal place and address that would cause consecutive events at the same location to have different place names, while there was no change to the administrative geography, then I will ignore the postal address and substitute the geographic / administrative place-name as the event goes into the FH datafile.

I also dislike using post towns when there's no way I can expect to find when they applied from / to.

...
For the standardised place field how much of a stretch would it be to have a feature that could connect to an online gazetteer? And which ones?

Warning - sweeping statement arriving... Most online gazetteers are not to be trusted.

Even the Vision of Britain Gazetteer has issues - I tried to understand something quite recently and the write-up said that this particular admnistrative body X was created in YYYY to replace A, B, C - but entry A gave a different date for its end (and therefore amalgamation into X).

...
Do more "modern countries" (e.g. Australia, Canada, US etc.) not have this problem because as they were settled a "township/county/state/country" type hierarchy was imposed? What happens with big metro-counties in the US? (I notice Miami-Dade is termed by Wikipedia as a "Two-tier federation")

I take it (smiley warning!) that you've never tried to understand counties etc, in Australia or Canada? In Manitoba, for instance, "my" area of interest used Rural Municipalities but other parts didn't. And Ontario used counties. (Presumably, except where they didn't). And I gave up trying to follow Australian local government areas and hoped that I'd not created any ambiguity.

So far as I can see, American genealogists seem to side-step / ignore the bigger metropolitan areas. Greater St. Louis, e.g., straddles two states so must surely mess up the simple hierarchy - further, there is an even larger St. Louis–St. Charles–Farmington, MO–IL Combined Statistical Area (I'm copying from Wikipedia here).

[davidf]

I have a couple of certificates from the Caxton Registration District, and that is in the “Counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon”.

Might that have been a poor guess at the new name after 1974 for what was eventually just called Cambridgeshire? Per the inevitable Wikipedia (not very well sourced/referenced admittedly - but see Local Government Act 1972, SCHEDULE 1)

Following the Local Government Act 1972 restructuring, modern Cambridgeshire was formed in 1974 through the amalgamation of two administrative counties: Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely, comprising the historic county of Cambridgeshire (including the Isle of Ely); and Huntingdon and Peterborough, comprising the historic county of Huntingdonshire and the Soke of Peterborough, historically part of Northamptonshire.

my emboldening / italics

[Mark1834]

Not sure that follows, as my certificates all seem to be located according to the contemporary name of the area, not translated into what it would be when they were issued. For example, London can be Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Metropolitan Borough of ..., London Borough of ..., etc.

I found some additional examples looking through all my certificate images, including those harvested from other websites, and curiously it doesn't always appear to be consistent even for the same location:

Various Births and Deaths in Caxton between 1845 and 1927, all in the Counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon
Four marriages in Caxton between 1841 and 1907, all in the County of Cambridge
1841 Birth and 1868 Death in the Sub-district of Stradbroke in the Counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, even though UK BMD classes the whole of Hoxne district as Suffolk
1861 Marriage in the District of Wisbech in the Counties of Cambridge and Norfolk
Various Deaths in Sub-districts of Wisbech, all described as Norfolk even though Wisbech was classified as Cambridgeshire for registration purposes
1901 Death in the Sub-district of St Neots in the Counties of Hunts Beds & Cambs
1912 Death in the Sub-district of St Neots in the County of Huntingdon

[tparkhill]

Its been a while since I checked back here. Thanks for all the thoughts. I have tried a number of approaches over the past month. And after hundreds of hours of trying a few approaches, this is where I have landed . . .

- It is challenging to just consolidate places first, as I end up with several alternate names, and don't know which one to choose.
- So I have experimented with different orders to click on columns, to bring the most possible common places next to each other (For me, this is Part 3, Part 1, Part2). With tens of thousands of places, one does not want to search around the LONG list to figure which to combine - its too slow.
- I have quite a few historic place names, so I need to do some "research" on Google to figure out what are old names and which are new names, and what the correct spelling is.

Putting these constraints together, what I have been doing is:
1. After hitting Part 3, Part 1 and Part 2 . . . I combine the obvious ones next to each other that are the same, "clean up" the formatting, and copy the location name at same time.
2. copy and paste the location name into Google in front of "lat long", this gives me:
a. if the location name is current and correct, the lat long pops up, and I can cut and paste it quickly into the
record (which is still open on the other screen).
b. if the county is wrong, changed, etc., it is pretty easy to figure out from search results, and fix it.
c. if the location is an old name, I remove "lat long" perhaps type in "historic" and up pops articles that
explain the old vs. new name, then I can adjust search to get the lat and long

If someone were watching my screen, they might say this that I am going "lightning fast" . . . , but with tens of thousands of locations, at about 400 hrs., I am not even 1/4 of the way complete. So in total, this clean up is more than a 1,600 hour project.

One could argue that I could just consolidate, and hope the Geocoder works, but I have been re-Geocoding ones that already have lat/long and I would say about 20% of the locations change (are corrected). So if I just trusted the Geocoder I would either have a large error rate, or still have to stop and research those ones that seem off. And it has seems like the faster reliable way to see the problems (old/new names, locations that Geocode incorrectly, etc.) is to be in a Goggle search for each location. Note that I also hit "Online Map" when location does not appear simple, to make sure its working.

I have also found:
- As was pointed out by others, I have confirmed that Geocoding often gives different locations if the location has "USA, United States, etc.), and it sometimes has trouble with counties (obviously when wrong when of new/old name issue, but also sometimes when county is correct). . It seems to prefer just city/state for most accurate results.
- One nice thing about FH, is that you can copy in lat/longs in many formats, and it almost always properly corrects the format. This is great! That said, there are certain types of source formats where it puts in the wrong lat longs. So for some original formats, I hit the "On line Map" to check, and then correct if needed.
- I have found a variety of web sites that can help with old places and their current modern day location., But I have not found one reliable place. It would really be great if there were a site for the UK that one could type in old locations, ad have them converted to either new names or lat/long. I am guessing someday this will happen.
- thus far, out of fear, I have avoided Wales - the old/new place name issue will be very difficult for me in Wales.

So, as you would expect, while there is satisfaction getting places cleaned up, after 400 hours of very fast repetitive work I going going a little "bonkers". Doing this 10 hrs./day, I needed to shift to a vertical ergonomic mouse and operate the mouse with both hands to avoid carpal tunnel (and ice arm every night). Oh, and I broke my right shoulder in a fall two weeks ago . . . but using a board with the mouse in my lap, I can still move my hand quickly, while the shoulder heals. So as the knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail said, "merely a flesh wound".

One of the morals to the story, as stated by others, is that if you are starting out, and want to plot your places, one should carefully think ahead and be very careful with format during entry.

Thanks again for all of the great advice!
Trent

[AdrianBruce]

Thanks for the insights, Trent.

One nice thing about FH, is that you can copy in lat/longs in many formats, and it almost always properly corrects the format. This is great!

Good point - I often use this, without thinking about it and it's worth highlighting as a neat piece of work.

Re trusting the Geocoder - depends which one you mean. I wouldn't trust the inbuilt Geocoder, I'm afraid. (You wouldn't believe where some Irish places end up!) Even the Google-based Geocoder in the Map Life Facts plug-in can fasten on the wrong parts of the name, but the way I use it reveals the issues immediately in the UI. But the way I use it, couldn't hit your productivity.

It would really be great if there were a site for the UK that one could type in old locations, and have them converted to either new names or lat/long.

We have so many anomalies that I fear this might never happen - just look at (if you're feeling brave) the detached parts of Worcestershire in Staffordshire and vice versa. There's a lot, many of which changed at different times. And we currently have a slow churn of reorganisations under unitary authorities, instead of counties. Fortunately, Wikipedia helps - but it's not all in one place.

thus far, out of fear, I have avoided Wales

Ah. Yes. If, like me, you want to use consistent spellings (and some don't), this can be, err, challenging. I have previously said that I really don't want to have all of "Carnarvonshire", "Caernarvonshire" and "Caernarfonshire"... But you have to make your own mind which version you want to use - that's if you're using consistent spellings.

[LornaCraig]

It would really be great if there were a site for the UK that one could type in old locations, ad have them converted to either new names or lat/long. I am guessing someday this will happen.

I know you have already tried many websites so you have probably tried the Gazetteer of British Place Names at https://gazetteer.org.uk/index. It's worth a look if you haven't seen it. In the Place Name search you can specify exact match, 'contains' or 'sounds like' etc, and in the results you can click Details to see the historic county, the (current) administrative county and the Lat/Long. It includes over 280,000 British place names.

[fhtess65]

<SNIP>
Do more "modern countries" (e.g. Australia, Canada, US etc.) not have this problem because as they were settled a "township/county/state/country" type hierarchy was imposed? What happens with big metro-counties in the US? (I notice Miami-Dade is termed by Wikipedia as a "Two-tier federation")

Just to point out, Canada does NOT have states - it has provinces and territories, and only some provinces have counties. And the township/province/country hierarchy isn't universal either. And all structure is fluid. I grew up in the township of Nepean outside Ottawa (the capital), Carleton County, Ontario, Canada. In 1978, Nepean became a city...in 2001, Nepean was folded into Ottawa as a huge amalgamation took place (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/ ... ottawa-ont), as the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton was dissolved and replaced. And that's just since I was born in 1965 and one province only. My husband grew up in British Columbia - he says there were counties at one point in BC, but they now no longer exist.

Just a warning to remember that Canada is NOT like the United States (I heard that a lot when visiting as a child - when I insisted I was Canadian, I was told "it's the same thing"...um, NO)...

[davidf]

remember that Canada is NOT like the United States

And unfortunately the opposite is not true either!

When referring to a "township/county/state/country" type hierarchy I was trying to cover too many bases (I hurriedly say before Australians, Irish etc. jump in with "us to"!). And I'm in "England" a country (without a parliament, without a head of state, ...) that is part of another country (or two?: GB? & UK)!

I sometimes wonder with some data items whether we need (in FH & GEDCOM - so it is unlikely to happen) to be able to individually characterise data points by means of some form of associated "characterisation" field. So we could have:

"Rowledge, Farnham, Surrey, England"
= "Village, Town, County, Country"

"Hampstead, Camden, Greater London, England"
= "Locality, Borough, Metropolitan County, Country"

Then with suitable processing (and a good user interface that intelligently defaults) we would not need to pad place fields with commas and spaces. This could apply to the places attached to facts and to the standardised places (and we have never really got our minds around the issue with keeping standardised names up to date).

Similar considerations could apply to names (extending the use of slashes to indicate non-displaying delimiters):

"Vincent /Van Gogh/"
= "Given Name, Surname"

"Mao /Zedong/"
= "Surname, Given Name"

"Llywelyn /ap /Gruffydd /ap /Morgan/"
= "Given Name, participle, patronymic, participle, patronymic2

"Pyotr /Ilyich/ Tchaikovsky/"
= "Given Name, patronymic, surname"

"Ursula /von der/Leyen/"
= "Forename, Surname Prefix, Surname"

[AdrianBruce]

...
I sometimes wonder with some data items whether we need (in FH & GEDCOM - so it is unlikely to happen) to be able to individually characterise data points by means of some form of associated "characterisation" field. So we could have:

"Rowledge, Farnham, Surrey, England"
= "Village, Town, County, Country"
...

I have a vague feeling that at some point possibly in the distant past, GEDCOM was talking about a place-name hierarchy. However, I think it seems to have gone quiet on that score - perhaps FamilySearch did some research for once before writing the software and gently put it back into the "too difficult" basket. Or "too difficult for the benefit...". (See PLACE_HIERARCHY - I think that's what it was for in some odd fashion).

[BillH]

In the US there are many different situations.

Not all states have counties. Louisiana for instance has parishes.
Not all states have townships. These are mostly west of the Mississippi.
Some cities are not in a county, they are independent cities.
Our capital, Washington DC, is not a state and is not in a state.

I'm sure there are oddities as well.

Bill

[tatewise]

...
I sometimes wonder with some data items whether we need (in FH & GEDCOM - so it is unlikely to happen) to be able to individually characterise data points by means of some form of associated "characterisation" field. So we could have:

"Rowledge, Farnham, Surrey, England"
= "Village, Town, County, Country"
...

It has already 'happened' with GEDCOM 7.0.1 for structured Place names and to some extent personal Names:

Place_Structure.png (151.56 KiB) Viewed 733 times

Personal_Name_Structure.png (204.84 KiB) Viewed 733 times