Family Historian User Group

I've produced a tool to help with entering place names and addresses... It contains data on 12,000 or so G.B. parishes (stolen with permission from Parloc) and adds (or matches) those found in your Gedcom. As you start typing it does drop-down lists of possible place names, and when you select a place, copies it to the clipboard so you can just paste into FH, and gives you a list of known addresses to chose from similarly, and a button to link directly to the place in Streetmap.co.uk

Jane has offered to make it downloadable from here, but first I'd like to ask on the forum if anyone would like to beta test it to make sure it's more generally usable than just the way I do things, and see if I have any bugs that don't show up in my own usage.

If you're interested, please get in touch.

ID:2005

Hi Chris

I'd be happy to give it a go.

Cheers

Nick

More than happy to give it a go as well.

I, also, if you need another.

I'm happy to try it out if you need another.

I have just had a 'play' and it looks pretty useful.
It doesn't know of some villages which is a shame as my lot are all country bumkins (and proud of it [tongue])
Otherwise it does what it says on the tin. It's certainly handy if you aren't sure of a place name. For instance from a census transcript as it comes up with suggestions for you as you type.
I have just used it to go through all my place names in FH and consolidated them all making sure I have them correct at the same time. As I said not all remote places are recognised but in the main very useful. I'll certainly be using it in future.
Thanks Chris.

Clive,

Thanks for your comments, nice to know someone's using it. I'm working on adding civil parishes and registration districts to the data, which will give us a lot more place names, but of course I don't have grid coordinates for them all unless they happen to coincide with ecclesiastical parishes. It'll also be able to very quickly tell you what district a village was in, which is a problem I particularly wanted to solve since GENUKI went over to one enormous PDF which is a pain to search.

(We have a tree full of country folk too).

Thanks again, I'll keep you informed of progress.
Chris

Chris,

You wrote

... nice to know someone's using it.

I assume you didn't need me as a beta tester as I've received nothing ... which is quite OK but I'm now wondering if you did actually send something but it never arrived.

Paul,

I sent you a message here, perhaps it got lost... I'll do it again.

Cheers,
Chris

Did you get my message Paul?... if not perhaps you should contact Jane in case they're getting lost.

Thanks to everyone who's tried it out.

Version 1.2 is now available in the Downloads section under Gedcom.

Is it possible to do something about the speed at which it loads the CSVs. On my pretty fast system it takes a good few minutes to load Parishes.CSV. First time I ran the program I thought it had crashed until I moused over the place name edit line and saw a message indicating it was still loading - though with the message not changing it still looked like it had crashed. I was even more surprised when I checked the size of Parishes.CSV and found it only 284Kb.

I then made the mistake of pressing reload when looking at the files and was presented with a nice barchart showing progress - it would be nice if that was in the main window as well.

Loading my GedCom of 5Mb means I might as well come back in the morning by the speed at which it works. Looks like I'll have to keep the program open all the time.

I still think it sounds a very useful program though as I regularly end up searching the big PDF of districts to check where a place is.

A nice touch would be to add a link to Google maps as well as Streetmaps (maps.google.co.uk).

I haven't managed to use it yet - still loading!

Thanks for the feedback.

You're right of course, loading time is an issue. But on my 2-year old Dell desktop it takes 3.5 seconds to load Parishes.CSV, and 21 seconds to load our Gedcom of 6.13 Mb containing 17,000 individuals and (more relevantly) 2,942 differently named places (it feels like longer). I wonder if there's something wrong with your system or the way it's installed.

I've tended to do as much as possible while loading in the way of breaking up place names into component parts (hierarchic parts, alternative names, prefixes, comments, ...) and matching them and storing them all in the right places in my internal data model, so that I can identify different representations of the same place correctly (I may have gone over the top a bit, and I'm sure it can be fine tuned) in order to get the best responsiveness in normal use. But I was disapointed with the time it takes to load, and will be looking at this.

The way I tend to use it is to load it once when I start FH, and leave it in the corner until I close down.

I had a quick look at Google maps, but couldn't see how to link to it by program... Does anyone here know how to do this?

I'm having problams installing Toponymy.  I'm running Windoze 2000 pro with service pack 4, on a 6 year old Celeron 766MHz with 256Mb RAM.
The zip file has been unzipped into a temporary directory, giving me the setup.exe, toponymy.cab and setup.lst files.
Having double clicked on setup.exe, the message about copying files appears.  Just as the 7th file is being copied, a message appears to the effect that some of my system files are out of date, and they need updating and then reboot is required.  Even though I answer yes to the question, and yes to a reboot, I am still getting the same message next time I run setup.exe.

Thanks for the info about loading times. Must be my setup though I've got a 2Ghz Pentium 4 with 1Gb RAM. I've just upgraded to IE7 and have noticed it taking up a lot of processing power even when I'm not using it, so it might be linked to that.

As for Google you can link to to a map with a town name, street, postcode or lat/long.

Eg.
http://maps.google.com/maps?&ll=51.7901 ... &om=1&z=12 shows my ancesteral home.

Where
?q=51.79,-0.39 is the lat/long query. You can use &l1=51.79,-0.39 instead of a query but if you don't have a query you get the left pane of local information appearing. You can put in a dummy query which doesn't change the location of the map but it does put the query in the search text box ready for use.
&om=1 enables the small overlay map, 0 disables it
&z=12 is the zoom level between 1 (whole world) and 17 (house level). You can also set a zoom level with an area such as &spn=0.072415,0.17046

HTH

Jon

Also have a problem installing. Have a windows98 SE machine. On running setup says needs to update system files fine but when machine restarts get error message saying that oleaut32.dll cannot run. which seems to stop everything else running properly. Luckily i am a computer engineer and knew how to put back the file from the original 98 disk. Now my machine is back working ok, but will not attempt to install again as don't want to have to go through the process of reinstallinf system files to get machine to work.

I too am running Windows 2000 and it tells me some system files are out of date.

I'm sorry but there is no way I'm letting it update system files for me. This is a grave security risk. I've never had a program ask me before to do this. Besides many of them will probably be replaced back by the system any way if they are really SYSTEM files.

I don't know you, I don't know which files are being updated, I don't know what with, where they came from etc or even if this replacement is intended by you and not some trojan.

Sorry.

Possibly if you give us reasons behind this, what the files are etc I might feel better about this.

Mark

You're right of course, you should never let some downloaded freebie update your system files... if it asks, say no (if I was a hacker, it wouldn't ask). The program will probably work anyway. If it doesn't, I'm sorry, just throw it away.

It was developed on XP and the setup program is built by the Microsoft development kit. I don't know how it decides if your system needs updating.

Chris, if you're using Visual Studio 6 or VB 6 have you got the latest service pack? I've got a feeling this will make sure you have the latest dlls, etc.

I'd also recommend Inno Setup for your setup program. http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php


Nick

Chris, I am using XP and on the first few tries I had problems. Then I closed all programs including antivirus and firewall and it has installed and is working well. I have now created a CSV file for the streets of Portsmouth which is working fine. If anyone would find it useful I will send it to them.
I now have identified all the inconsistencies in my 'Address' list and need to find an easy way to correct them?
Peter

I use XP Pro SP2 on a Pentium 4, 3GHz with 1MB RAM. I have installed Toponymy successfully as setup.exe only wanted to install two “system” files - tabctl32.ocx and mscomctl.ocx – each of which pre-dated what was already present and so could be skipped.

These two files are VB ActiveX control files. I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if there would be any issues arising from anyone updating earlier versions.

When I start up Toponymy it only takes about 3 seconds to load the supplied CSV files plus the locations from my own gedcom file (but the latter only contains about 200 locations).

I find Toponymy to be a useful application and I shall certainly be using it regularly from now on. Many thanks to Chris for developing it and making it available.

Paul Freeman said:

These two files are VB ActiveX control files. I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if there would be any issues arising from anyone updating earlier versions.

For these controls to already be on your system it implies that you may have installed an application which also uses them. It is possible that this application (or applictions) rely on features which were added to a more recent version of the control. Therefore replacing a later version with an earlier version could break other applications on your PC. You should never replace a later system file with an earlier one unless you really know what you're doing.

Peter,

The way I've been sorting out my addresses is like this...

Select the 'wrong' address in Toponymy. Hit the binoculars in the FH toolbar, press Ctrl+V, select All Record Types and Search Type: All text fields, then Find First.

Select the 'right' address in Toponymy.

Check the context in the records window by eye. Click the Address data, select the text, and Paste. Then Find next, etc.

Nick,

I had a look at Inno Setup and although it produces a neater result, it seems to require a lot more knowledge of how things should be done than I have. I thought it was safer to let the one that comes with Visual Studio 6 do whatever needs doing (naive it seems).

Making sure I have the 'latest' versions of components only helps in the short term... sooner or later someone will run it on a system with newer ones.

As for installing on earlier versions of Windows, I really don't have any idea what the implications are, nor the resources to try it on them all, so I think it would be foolish to attempt anything (unless anyone can help?)

Nick,

Just for the record, I agree with everything you wrote.

That's because you seem to have misunderstood what I wrote ... or putting it another way, perhaps I didn't make myself clear.

When I wrote 'issues arising from anyone updating earlier versions' I did not mean replacing a later version by an earlier one; I meant the exact opposite - updating an earlier version by a later one.

I know that even this way round is not safe in all circumstances as I have had a problem after replacing an earlier version of msvcrt.dll (the MS Visual C runtime library) by a later one. As I said before, I don't know if this way round could create problems with VB components.