davidf wrote: ↑23 Sep 2022 19:21
... how the name of a point on the globe
was described can be important and I am not totally sure that I want to relegate that to "text from source" (which is an alternative strategy).
I guess I am trying to get a clearer line between actual evidence "Abode is Farnham" and derived evidence - "North Yorkshire" does not appear on the document - and would probably have been North Riding - or is Knaresborough that bit of the West Riding that ended up in North Yorkshire? ...
Personally, I
have relegated the name / description in the source to "text from source". I have too many issues appearing in my mind now (not necessarily when I made my decision) to contemplate differently.
Firstly, philosophically, for me the events, attributes, etc, stored in FH,
ought to be fit for output now in (usually narrative) reports, etc., if someone asks for such. I take on all the strictures about the unnatural nature of generated text, etc. But I don't have time to concoct "proper" narratives that will be out of date potentially as soon as they are produced. In the case of a placename - suppose the source says that someone was born in Widnes in abt 1860. The derived evidence might be that (1) their birth was registered in Prescot Registration District and (2) Prescot RD was then entirely within Lancashire.
My birth event would be that they were born in abt 1860, Widnes, Lancashire, England. The text from source would say "Widnes". I would almost certainly also have the FreeBMD index cited as a source for their birth. In all honesty, I probably wouldn't bother citing
https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/districts/prescot.html - counts as a "well known fact". The Place Record for Widnes, Lancashire, England would have a Standardised Place name of Widnes, something-or-other, England. (Not sure what that middle element would be - Halton maybe? I suspect just Widnes, England would geocode quite happily).
Why else would my entered value consist of both quoted and derived information? Well, I have in mind the example of a retired Colonel who died, presumably while taking the waters, at Neuenahr in Prussia in the 1880s. (Not my blood relative - it appears that others have a better class of relly than I!

) Although it's not the case here, I
could well have found that I had both German and English language sources for that death and, short of recording multiple deaths for him, I have to make a decision between writing the English ("Prussia, Germany") or German ("Preussen, Deutschland") - and in my theoretical case,
both forms are in the sources for the same event. I can't (in my mind) be precious about this, I have to make a choice, which will not, in this theoretical case, match one of the sources. This example says to me that there will always be instances where text from source and recorded event data don't match.
So yes, I think that there
are issues over how to record quoted and derived bits in place-names, but for me they pall before just getting a place-name immediately meaningful (Great-grandad was born at Poole but it would be silly of me to ever record his birthplace as "Poole" because it's "Poole outside Nantwich, Cheshire" not "Poole, Dorset" - yes, we could both envisage more comprehensive versions of GEDCOM and the software but....)