Place levels in FH

mccarter · Post by **mccarter** » 16 Jun 2007 11:22

Hi again

I am astonished that there seems to be no discussion on how best to store place information in FH. On the TMG forums it used to be a major topic all the time.

It seems to me from my limited knowledge so far that to get a consistent method in FH is almost impossible without entering ugly double or leading commas.

How do you manage to sensibly store a census place such as Overstone (a small hamlet), Elsdon (the parish / nearest village), Northumberland, England or alternatively 10 Elswick Court, Westgate, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, England or even a US address including the county and state. And how does FH know how to print them out consistently in short, medium, long format or whatever.

This could be a major stumbling block for me because place geography is a vital part of genealogy.

thanks

ID:2366

ireneblackburn · Post by **ireneblackburn** » 16 Jun 2007 13:42

The house number and street are classed as the address. The place can be entered as Hudspath, Elsdon, Northumberland. If you download the free demo version you can enter a few places (next to bmd or baptism/burial entries) and then look at Tools, Work with Data, Places.

I'm not sure of Gedcom Census works with the trial version so I don't know if you can test that.

Perhaps there is no real discussion because it is not an issue with FH

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 16 Jun 2007 16:26

I have found most of the current mapping programs work well with the places as entered in FH. Keeping the 'address' away from the place as Irene suggests works and still provides the mapping I need in google earth, Family Atlas and Map my family tree.

mccarter · Post by **mccarter** » 16 Jun 2007 17:10

Hi again

I do have the free trial and have already used it with the census program to enter 30 odd of my ancestors. I like the speed and up-to-date feel of the program.

I realise the address is held separately from the place but where does address finish and place begin? It will vary depending on how much detail you have. If you upload an address to an internet site with just Northumberland as the last element then it could be confused with Northumberland in USA or New Zealand and probably others.

I need to look at the report options before I make a final decision.

thanks

ireneblackburn · Post by **ireneblackburn** » 16 Jun 2007 19:25

In Tools, Work with Data, Places, click on the button called columns, you can add another column (or more) so you can add the country at the end of each place, so you would have Hudspath, Elsdon, Northumberland, England

My addresses include house and street, the rest is the place

Irene

mccarter · Post by **mccarter** » 16 Jun 2007 22:59

Sorry to be pedantic but adding another column for the country increases the problem of inserting commas when you don't have data for the number of levels. So getting back to Elsdon (and why not it's a nice village) if you lived in Elsdon rather than Overstone you would need to enter ',Elsdon' so that Elsdon appeared at the right level. Do people actually do this? If so then fine it must be the solution to the problem.

Can't say I like it much but I've just bought the program so I must like the rest of it!

cheers

JonAxtell · Post by **JonAxtell** » 16 Jun 2007 23:56

I've seen the extra commas method being used in other databases. I myself don't bother and just ensure that I keep a full place including country all the time. I consider an address to be a physical building or exact location. Anything which is a hamlet or larger gets put in the place field. I always include at least country in the place unless I'm unsure.

I haven't found it necessary to put in extra commas for missing bits of information. Every now and then I go into the Tools->Work with Places function and find the entries which match by the first part and check if they could be the same. So if I have Redbourn, England from some time in the paste when I didn't know the county, but a Redbourn, Hertfordshire, England from a later entry I can match them up and fix the short entry.

HTH

SunnyLady · Post by **SunnyLady** » 17 Jun 2007 12:48

A different view: I tried the recommended way and then, after some experimenation and thanks to the real flexibility of FHist, decided to go my own way with places and addresses.

So I do not often actually use the address function - yes it means I have a lot of places, but it works for what I want from the programme - I wanted to be able to sort on all fields, and it also means I can autofill too if I want.

I use five columns (think the standard is four but have been using five for so long I cannot remember!) and, working backwards, the last one (5) is the country (which not everyone would need perhaps!), the county or district (4), the town (3), the village (2) and the first one is the one that I think others put in the address - and for long addresss I used things like '[name] cottage on [name] road' - which means no additional commas and reads right in reports. In most reports any blanks do not appear. And the custom query for place lets me see all those who have a connection with one particular part of an address.

If I had a wish it would be to enable me to rank the columns (so instead of only sorting on one, I could, say, sort on column 5 then column 2 - given that in two different countries there are places of the same name....!).

I expect there are things that by doing it this way I am making more difficult but as only I use the material I think I am free to do what works for me.

CR · Post by CR » 21 Jun 2007 10:35

I use 5 columns/fields like SunnyLady and put in leading commas where nessesary. This is a bit if a pain but it makes reports etc. print out properly.
I don't tend to use the residence attribute (I assume this is what you refer to as the address above?) much either.
Jane are there any links to the family atlas and map my family tree sites you refer to please?

Regards
Clive [smile]

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 21 Jun 2007 11:02

http://www.familyatlas.com/

http://www.progenygenealogy.com/map-my-family-tree.html

I have both, but prefer family atlas.

With regard to addresses you can add an address to any fact (event/attribute) in addition to and separate from the place.

mccarter · Post by **mccarter** » 21 Jun 2007 14:31

Hi

Thanks for all the opinions on place levels.

Can I also suggest you look at GenMap which is a UK mapping tool. Just Google it to find the website. (Archer software)

Getting back to place levels I have experimented a bit and I am still uncertain how to approach the problem.

1) Using the address field for the top line, at least when it is a street etc, means that you get a list of addresses printed at the end of a report section referenced to things like Census(1), Census(2) Occupation(1) Residence(1) etc etc. I think that looks awful and I don't think I will be going down that route

2) On the other hand using 4 or 5 levels means that every time a place is printed you get the full address including the country which will tend to make narrative reports rather hard work to read. I thought there might be a facility to print a short address but if there is it's hard to find!

3) I'm still not clear what you do when you don't have that number of levels? If all you know is someone had their birth registered in Newcastle upon Tyne you only have 3 levels, so you would need to put in 2 commas - I assume? Or do you just type in Newcastle in level 1?

What would be good at some point is a useful feature of TMG which is putting a minus sign in front of an address element to stop it being printed. That gets round the problem mentioned at 2) above. If all your family lived in Northumberland you could suppress the printing of Northumberland, England with every place.

thanks

rims · Post by **rims** » 23 Jun 2007 13:34

Hi
Personally, I agree that this is a significant problem. Given that every 'place' is in effect part or whole of an address, it has always seemed to me that it would have been more sensible to allow place data to have been entered in a structured form, similar to addresses. I'm sure that's the way it will eventually evolve over coming years.

Meantime since FH only allows you to work with place data, I've ended up entering everything under 'place'. I dislike the idea of double commas, and in anycase would never be able to work out what level of the address I was at.
What I have found works reasonably is a) to be consistent about *always* adding the larger place elements - town, county, country etc. If you then display the data in reverse order, you consistently end up with town or street names sorted properly in their own columns, provided that
b) you put the house name or number in its own field - ie '31, Sunny street'. You can then match all places with the same street name alphabetically for example.

But I cannot help but lament the poor handling of this aspect. This sort of data field handling is a basic element of computing, and should not need these fudges to get it to work....

If the data is entered as address rather than place, is there any way of using queries to print out an ordered list of all the addresses mentioned in various events?

Rafik

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