Family Historian User Group

When I enter something in the 'location' field on the Ancestry search dialog, it pops up a list of suggested places, e.g. 'PUD' gives 'Puddington, Devon, England' amongst others.

Does anyone know what the underlying parts are - maybe Parish, County, Country?

Thanks,

ID:7025

As far as I can see, what goes into that list is determined by the phases of the Moon, the contents of a chicken's insides and a half-eaten gazetteer. In other words - I can discern no logic.

My local parish (Coppenhall, Cheshire) appears - its two townships (Monks Coppenhall and Church Coppenhall) don't. But Coppenhall Moss, which was as soggy a feature in the parish as you might suspect, does appear.

It certainly isn't a list of birthplaces from the census since I have seen birthplaces listed in censuses that aren't there in the prompt list.

You may have guessed that I'm starting to play the how to structure my PLACes game!

I notice on the glossary for places mention of 'Map My Family Tree' and 'Family Atlas'. Is anyone using these, or something like ancestralatlas.com? (Or even just FH plugins & Google?)

For what it's worth, my structure for the UK is a 3 part name:
- settlement, county, country.

Settlement is generally whatever village, town, city, hamlet is nearest.

County is the historic-county, so Widnes, e.g., is always in Lancashire, no matter when the event is. (Its administrative county has been Lancashire, then Cheshire and it currently has no county as it's in the unitary authority of Halton.)

Country is England, Wales, etc.

I think this is pretty standard. Couple of howevers...
1. I often go to a 4 part name to record suburbs, e.g. Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Manchester, Lancashire, England, partly because I'd never remember where they are otherwise.
2. I'll probably annoy devotees of Middlesex because I record 'London, , England' and don't split it into its constituent counties.

I can do this because I don't ever interface with any standard lists of places - if you do, you may need to review, but fundamentally I have zero confidence in standard place-name directories. It's possible to get lists of administrative areas but many place-names I deal with have never been administrative areas. If you want to deal with standard place name lists, you may need to think differently.

If Map My Family Tree and Family Atlas are anything like Google Maps, then they are only effective if you supply modern place names, because they do not know historical place names, nor when in history your place names relate to.

So to overcome this dilemma I use historically correct PLACe names holding District/Parish, County, Country columns, and ADDRess details including modern County and Postcode.

Then when using Google Maps and associated Plugins the ADDRess field is supplied for plotting.