Family Historian User Group

I'm experimenting with importing a gedcom. In my own database I've only entered a small number of coordinates, so the FH geocoding has lots of work to do. It gets a lot of places correct, but also makes some big mistakes, especially in East Europe (Czechoslavakia in the Philippines), and smaller mistakes when it apparently recognises the province, but not the village.
Does anyone have tips for efficient ways to check through the geocoding results?

I did eventually find the trick of highlighting the place in the left-hand panel, and then right-clicking to jump to the map marker - it wasn't intuitive.

Re the big mistakes in the native Geocoder - it will probably (I hope!) be worth your while to understand the "Map Life Facts" plug-in. It uses the Google Geocoder, which normally appears more successful than the one accessed directly by FH. It is more of a pain to set up because it needs a Google Maps API Key and, IIRC, you need to supply it with a credit card. This is because you will get charged for usage past a certain level of daily activity.

However, provided you are sensible and don't throw a massive number of empty places at it, you won't get charged. Normally, I geocode just small numbers of places and check each group on the map as I go along.

There is also a Place Exceptions plug-in, which I have used in the past, which will look at places and see if any in a geographical area are noticeably different from others in the same area. I just checked mine again using that plug-in and it told me that the co-ords of "Wharton or Witton, Cheshire, England" were considerably different from other places in "Cheshire, England". When I checked it on the map, it had been geocoded somewhere in Lancashire - but it was a silly place-name to start with. Conversely, it also warned me about "Wonthaggi, Victoria, Australia" - it was considerably different from my other Victoria places - but that was fine because my other Victoria places are very much concentrated in one area.

Both plug-ins require careful thought to either set up or use, but the encoding results are worth it.

AdrianBruce wrote: ↑

30 Apr 2023 21:32

Re the big mistakes in the native Geocoder - it will probably (I hope!) be worth your while to understand the "Map Life Facts" plug-in. It uses the Google Geocoder, which normally appears more successful than the one accessed directly by FH. It is more of a pain to set up because it needs a Google Maps API Key and, IIRC, you need to supply it with a credit card. This is because you will get charged for usage past a certain level of daily activity.

However, provided you are sensible and don't throw a massive number of empty places at it, you won't get charged

Adrian is wrong about getting charged.
If you set the geocoding limits within the free allowance as advised then you will never get charged.
All that happens is that you will be prevented from geocoding beyond the limits until the next day.

See the Map Life Facts plugin with Bing Maps support (21789) thread that is developing the plugin to offer free Bing Maps geocoding and soon also free Geoapify geocoding.

tatewise wrote: ↑

01 May 2023 10:36

... Adrian is wrong about getting charged.
If you set the geocoding limits within the free allowance as advised then you will never get charged. ...

Thanks - I'd forgotten that the limit could act as a functional block, rather than just advisory.

Another useful resource for British places (England, Scotland and Wales) is the Association of British Counties Gazetteer of British Place names at https://gazetteer.org.uk/ - this is a free downloadable and very comprehensive Gazetteer in csv format.

They have other useful, and free, resources - including county boundary data, information about historic counties and more of interest to the family historian.

A little more detail -

The gazetteer has almost 300,000 entries - covering England, Scotland and Wales and in addition to location, both as OS 10k grid reference and Latitude / Longitude, gives details of Historic County, Division, current Administrative County, District, Unitary Authority, and Police area.

I have found a number of places using the gazetteer that did not appear in places like Google maps, either because they were too small, or because they no longer existed.

Thank you for that link, a very interesting and useful website.

Little.auk wrote: ↑

12 May 2023 19:22

Another useful resource for British places (England, Scotland and Wales) is the Association of British Counties Gazetteer of British Place names at https://gazetteer.org.uk/ - this is a free downloadable and very comprehensive Gazetteer in csv format.

They have other useful, and free, resources - including county boundary data, information about historic counties and more of interest to the family historian.

A little more detail -

The gazetteer has almost 300,000 entries - covering England, Scotland and Wales and in addition to location, both as OS 10k grid reference and Latitude / Longitude, gives details of Historic County, Division, current Administrative County, District, Unitary Authority, and Police area.

I have found a number of places using the gazetteer that did not appear in places like Google maps, either because they were too small, or because they no longer existed.

David2416 wrote: ↑

13 May 2023 19:03

Thank you for that link, a very interesting and useful website.

Little.auk wrote: ↑

12 May 2023 19:22

Another useful resource for British places (England, Scotland and Wales) is the Association of British Counties Gazetteer of British Place names at https://gazetteer.org.uk/ - this is a free downloadable and very comprehensive Gazetteer in csv format.

Thanks for the feedback - I find the Gazetteer particularly useful for defining place names - The map of England looked very different in the 19th century. I have lots of places which were small settlements then, but have now been swallowed up into Birmingham.