* Work with data, Places

[Woodg]

Hi All,

(Whilst this issue arose from my conversion to FH7, it is not specific to importing.)

I have found an issue (bug? undocumented feature?) with Work With Data, Places.

All my places and addresses are imported to FH7 as a concatenation of Address and Place into Place in FH7. For example, I have "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" and have to manually split out the address and place data. (The Rearrange Address and Place Parts plugin can't help as the address and place combo layout/contents isn't consistent).

I usedthe Working With Data, Places option, find the place to be corrected, click on the Where Used button and get a list, then go and fix the records. When finished fixing I run Working With Data, Places again and now my "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" is gone and the count of "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" increases by 1. Perfect.

Partway through this long process I needed a break, so I thought I have a look at Maps and selected the Map All Places option. That was a big mistake. This updated all my Place records with map co-ordinates, which of itself isn't an issue, but it had a flow on effect with my editing of Places. Now, when I edit a place the "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" place has an extra entry count, which is as expected, but the original "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" now remains with a link value of zero, and now I have to Merge it to get rid of it. The only difference is my Places now have map co-ordinates. Now, the map co-ordinates are actually different, so I can understand why this has happened, but am wondering if this may be an unintended consequence. Should there be an option to ignore the map co-ordinates?

Is this a bug, a Wish List item, or not worth the trouble?

Thoughts anyone?

Glenn

P.S. As a workaround, I just completed the places editing, sorted by the Used column, then merged all the "zero" places to any other place record. The "zero" places are now gone.

[LornaCraig]

FH does not delete unused Place records automatically in case you have information in those records which would be lost if they were deleted. For example there might be something in the Note field, or a link to a Media record. Adding map coordinates to them didn't make any difference, those records were still all there in your project. However they can all be deleted simultaneously if you are sure you don’t need them, by adding them to a Named List. (It’s not necessary to merge them with other records to get rid of them.) See Delete One or Many Records

The action of viewing a Place in the Map window inevitably adds coordinates to it, but they can be changed manually if they are incorrect. The simplest way to do that is to click the Drag icon in the map toolbar and then drag the pointer on the map to the correct place. If you have geocoded a Place manually and want the geocoding be protected from change you should use Tools > Preferences > Map Window and set Mark Auto-geocodes as Tentative and Block refresh for Non-tentative Geocodes. (The ones you have set manually will be non-tentative.)

[tatewise]

I used the Working With Data, Places option, find the place to be corrected, click on the Where Used button and get a list, then go and fix the records. When finished fixing I run Working With Data, Places again and now my "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" is gone and the count of "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" increases by 1. Perfect.

May I suggest a different way of working that may avoid those problems and is far quicker?

There is no need to find where a Place name is used and change each entry because there is only one Place record linked to all those 'where used' entries.
Just click the Edit... button instead and change the Place name there once.
You will also be able to see any Notes or Lat/Long values held in that Place name record.

Alternatively, if you are merging all the '27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia' entries to become "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" then select them both and click the Merge... button.
Select "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" as the final version and click Select.

Whichever method you use, every 'where used' entry will automatically use the new Place name.

BTW: The Rearrange Address and Place Parts plugin can operate on any selected subset of your data.
So if you have a set of Place names that all need a similar rearrangement then the plugin can be used.
You just have to identify the subsets that need the same rearrangements. However, it won't perform the merge.

[LornaCraig]

There is no need to find where a Place name is used and change each entry because there is only one Place record linked to all those 'where used' entries.
Just click the Edit... button instead and change the Place name there once.
You will also be able to see any Notes or Lat/Long values held in that Place name record.

Alternatively, if you are merging all the '27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia' entries to become "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" then select them both and click the Merge... button.
Select "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" as the final version and click Select.

CAUTION: There are probably several different addresses associated with the same place, so there will be several different “address+place name” records which all eventually need converting to just the single place record. So if you simply change them using the Edit button or by merging them then you lose all the addresses! So Woodg didn't want to convert or merge them until after every use of them has been inspected and the address element had been copied into the address field. And if you are copying the address element into the address field on a case by case basis you might as well delete it from the Place field at the same time. I imagine that’s why Woodg did it that way.

[tatewise]

Yes, Lorna is correct. I had not thought of that scenario.

The plugin may be a workable solution and may be quicker even if only one Place name is rearranged each time.

[Woodg]

Hi Lorna and Mike,

Thanks for the responses. Lorna, I hadn't considered that the Place may have media and notes. Mine don't, but it is entirely possible they could have. I'll have to look at Named Lists. They are not something I've used yet.

And Mike, Lorna is correct. I couldn't directly edit the Places as I needed to cut the Address and paste it into the Address field. This seemed easiest to do by using the Where used button to edit the Fact.

Mike, I did look at the Rearrange Address and Place Parts plugin. We had discussed it in another thread. The problem is that I had too many address/place combinations (i.e., "Australia" and "New South Wales, Australia" and "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" and "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" and "Anglican Section, General Cemetery, 27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia".) There were just too many variations. I think it will be useful in the future if I decide I don't like the current Place format/layout and want to rearrange components.

I have come to an important conclusion about Places. I now have Places like this: ", ,Australia" and ", Sydney, Australia" and I don't like the leading commas. This will make me work harder to find correct 3-part locations!

Again, thank you both for your help.

Glenn

[Gowermick]

Glenn,
FWIW, change all 27 Smith Street, to Smith Street, 27. That way, all Smith Streets will be listed together rather than all Houses numbered 27!
Much easier to find neighbours that way

[tatewise]

Assume you want to change the Place "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" to the Address "27 Smith Street" and Place "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia".
In the plugin select that one Place name and set up the rearrangement of moving the first Place Part to the Address.
That will automatically change everywhere that is used in one go, so may be quicker than doing each one by hand.

If you can select more than one Place name that needs the same rearrangement then it gets even more efficient.

However, it may create 'Convergent Merged Place Names' that only differ by their suffix and need merging by hand.

[Vyger]

Is this a bug, a Wish List item, or not worth the trouble?

Glenn this is a current shortcoming of FH which I do hope CP will address. You do not say which software you are migrating from? the handling of Rootsmagic import Place and Address data is detailed in the update notes for 7.0.8.2.

There is a Current Wish List Item which should address these shortcomings, if you have not voted on it might I suggest you do.

FWIW, change all 27 Smith Street, to Smith Street, 27. That way, all Smith Streets will be listed together rather than all Houses numbered 27!
Much easier to find neighbours that way

I totally agree with the above and do the same in a slightly different style, geographical groupings and associations are very indicative to my research, see below;

FWIW, in my relational Site lists I enter the significant followed by the more specific usually in parentheses, some examples are below;

Main Street (#123) as opposed to 123 Main Street
Presbyterian Church (1st) as opposed to 1st Presbyterian Church
Methodist Church (New Connexion) as opposed to New Connexion Methodist Church

In the first example this groups the many hundreds of street addresses I have together helping me visualize the family groupings and associations as well as overcoming the sort fragmentation of street renumbering etc. In the second example I simply need to start typing the denomination to see the look ahead list of the Presbyterian Churches relational to the chosen Place or Parish, so all very intuitive and productive.

[Woodg]

Assume you want to change the Place "27 Smith Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia" to the Address "27 Smith Street" and Place "Sydney, New South Wales, Australia".
In the plugin select that one Place name and set up the rearrangement of moving the first Place Part to the Address.
That will automatically change everywhere that is used in one go, so may be quicker than doing each one by hand.

If you can select more than one Place name that needs the same rearrangement then it gets even more efficient.

However, it may create 'Convergent Merged Place Names' that only differ by their suffix and need merging by hand.

I MIke,

For single examples of my problem, I found it easier to use my Working With Data, Places method. The plugin works great for larger quantities, though. I've got them all changed now.

Glenn

[Woodg]

Glenn,
FWIW, change all 27 Smith Street, to Smith Street, 27. That way, all Smith Streets will be listed together rather than all Houses numbered 27!
Much easier to find neighbours that way

Hi Mike,

That is an interesting option. I'll try it on my test project. Is anyone using the reverse order for Places (i.e. Australia, New South Wales, Sydney)?

(As an aside, some years ago I wrote the User Requirements and Software Specifications to modify a billing system to use the address structure for Puerto Rico. What with urbanizacions, and barrios, and addresses with numbers but no street names, multiple streets with the same name in the same location, it was quite a job!)

Glenn

[Woodg]

Hi Vyger,

Thanks for the response.
I'm migrating from Relatively Yours 3 (RY3), and Australian-developed product that is no longer available and hasn't had updates since 2009. RY3 has a couple of ways to store places and addresses, but I used its Structured format, like this:

RY3 Places screen.png (14.31 KiB) Viewed 753 times

RY3 comes with a database of over 1.5 million places in a Country, State, Place format, with lat/lon for each place, along with from/to dates to indicate when the particular country, state or place were active (e.g. Aberdeenshire, Scotland is listed as being valid to 30 April 1975). This made consistency easy, but also a bit limiting (e.g. all England counties are listed as States, countries without a state-like locality just have "Not Otherwise Specified" for state). Unfortunately, when exporting from RY3 the places and addresses are concatenated into one single PLAC tag in the GEDCOM. There is an option to export places as individual components, but that option exports as codes only i.e Australia is exported as AUS, England as ENG, Egypt as EGY.

As for the Wish List Item, I voted for that in April last year, with a rating of 5!

I can see I have a lot of experimenting to do with places and addresses. I like your idea of having religion first for churches. I could do the same with cemeteries (i.e. Instead of Independant Section, Rookwood Cemetery, I'd have Rookwood Cemetery, Independent Section). This might make better use of the look ahead feature.

Thanks,

Glenn

[tatewise]

One consequence of using reverse order in Place names (i.e. Country, County, Town, Address) is that the qualifiers :SHORT and :MEDIUM are of little use as they return Country and Country, County respectively.
Similarly, for the Diagram Text Scheme Place Format: for Short and Medium and in Narrative Reports the Report > Options > Main tab option to Use Short Form for Repeated Place Names is ineffective.
It may be possible to work around some of those issues by using the =TextPart(...) function.
i.e. %FACT.PLAC:MEDIUM% may be replaced by =TextPart(%FACT.PLAC%, 3, 2, TIDY_REV) to produce Address, Town