Family Historian User Group

Some advice please.

I have many subtly different place names all over the place. What is the best practice in the use of such names?

Clearly when writing in what is on a document as free text in, for example, the right hand panel in the source section of events, one should write as exactly as possible what was written there, with no interpretation. But what should one put in in the Place and Address fields in the section under the event lists? Should one: expand abbreviations; use modern spellings; include extra information (e.g. include county and country); use modern counties where appropriate (e.g. Avon in place of Somerset in the relevant places; modern country names for place names in Imperial India etc) and so on. It seems to me that putting in exactly what is written into such searchable fields means searching causes problems, yet putting in, for example, Pakistan for records from northern Imperial India is rather odd too.

What do others do?

Tim

ID:1181

I tend to write places as village, town, county. Where a county no longer exists e.g. Westmorland I still use that name.

Where a county name has changed e.g. Cumbria, I tend to use Cumberland since that is the way it appears on Genuki and the name used for records.

In the case of Pakistan I would be inclined to put the modern country name but in the event note type in the original place name.

I tend to use the place names that were in existence at the time.  So for instance my sister in law was born in Wordsley, Staffordshire whereas her two children born at the same hospital some thirty years later were born in Wordsley, West Midlands.  I agree this can cause problems when searching but I think it is better to be accurate for the time of the event.

One of the biggest problem areas I find is census records for people born in what is now Greater London.  I have records for St. George in the East, Middlesex; St George East, Middlesex; St George East, Middlesex, London; St George East, London and several more variants.  On some census returns the parents may be listed as born in Hackney, London with their children in Hackney, Middlesex.

Another issue is where the post office uses a different county to where the place physically is.  For instance I grew up in a village called Ashbury about seventy miles west of London.  When we moved there it was in Berkshire, one week later the counties were reorganised and it became Oxfordshire, but the postal address was Ashbury, Swindon, Wiltshire.  I eventually decided to go with geography rather than the post office, so my brother was married in Ashbury, Oxfordshire.

As I live in the UK and all my ancestors were born in England I do not use country for any UK places.  I have cousins in Australia, Canada, USA etc and for these I add the country.

I use very similar rules to Tombaston. I record place names as they were recorded at the time. I only include the country if it is not England. I include the county based on the traditional county boundaries or the county at the time.

The Royal Mail use addresses that are convenient to their distribution network. They often bear little relation to geography, and therefore I ignore their designations.

Place names on census returns are a problem. I thought I had three ancestors all with the same name, until I discovered that they were born in a hamlet, and on one census were listed in that hamlet, in the next they were recorded under the village to one side, and on the third under the village the other side. It didn't help that the whole area was then absorbed into the nearest town!

I don't expand abbreviations unless I have independent confirmation of the expansion. I nearly got caught out by this early on in my research, and have learnt to record things as they were written at the time.

And then you get people who interchangeably use their first and second names [frown]