Where did Hawaii Territory Go?
I was just matching a ship immigration list for 1924 arriving in Honolulu to someone in the Family Tree. The only place suggested was "Honolulu, Oaho, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States" with a start date in in the 1800s. Honolulu used to show as a city for either Hawaii, United States or Hawaii Territory since Hawaii wasn't a state until 1959. Has someone scrambled up the Places database for Hawaii?
Answers
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@WDan5, yes, in answer to your question about the Places database for Hawaii, it does appear that the information for Hawaii is wrong; as it shows Hawaii as being a state, "1898 - Today."
The Places database can be found at:
When you add the "Hawaii" to the Search Places box, you will see the incorrect information. Clicking on the first instance of Hawaii provides additional information and, at the far right, the option to "Improve This Place."
We encourage you to use this option to provide feedback and suggestions for improving the location and related information.
For additional information on correcting or editing a place's information, you may find the following article helpful.
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This is not an error, just a change. See: https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/when-did-familysearch-combine-us-states-and-their-historic-territories-in-familysearch-places
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'fraid you're wrong there. It's much, much, much worse than a "change" or an "error".
They have taken correct, meaningful, accurate, useful information and chosen to distort it. Look at some quotes from what you link to:
"The distinction was accurate, but some users struggled to understand which place to select when documenting an ancestor's life." Aka some don't actually learn about the basic history of an area (a prerequisite for proper genealogical research) so we're going to degrade everyone's experience to pander to those users.
"The purpose of the change is to make it easier to correctly select a place for your ancestor or family member's life event." A outright lie there. It does NOT make it easier to "correctly" find the place. It makes it impossible to do so.
They claim to base the change on "three principles".
"Meaningful. Does the name represent what most users know and understand?
"Useful. Will most users recognize the name and be able to distinguish it from other options?
"Accurate. Does the name represent any important historical changes that occurred?"
So what is the most important of those three? Accuracy. Does saying Utah was a state from 1848 "represent any important historical changes that occurred"? No. It misses out one of the most important events in the whole history of the area: statehood.
Now in some cases state and territory are coterminus. Alaska and Hawaii are examples of that. In others they certainly are not. Missouri is an example of that. The page says Missouri was a state from 1812. Here's the catch: Missouri Territory was VASTLY larger than Missouri is today.
With this vandalism of the places database Familysearch are claiming that Missouri the state is the same as Missouri the territory. They are thus claiming that Missouri the state encompasses the whole of Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, most of Kansas, Wyoming and Montana with parts of Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico.
Is that "Meaningful"? No.
Is that "Useful"? No.
Is that "Accurate"? No.
So why was it done? Pandering to users who cannot be bothered to do basic historical research.
"We are most interested in small differences between place names when the differences are integral to the place's identity and researchers need them to find and share local records. On the other hand, we try to filter out large or trivial administrative differences that would only make the data more difficult or cumbersome to use."
So apparently Missouri Territory's enormous change of size is not "integral to the place's identity". Really? Apparently telling people that events taking place in the Black Hills of Dakota in 1817 (assuming anyone around there actually knew how to write at that point) were in the state of Missouri is going to be helpful and allow researchers to "find and share local records". Really?
Why then are there now thousands of entries for individual buildings in the places database? How does that not make the data "more cumbersome and difficult to use"? Why then do entirely fictional jurisdictions such as "British Colonial America" appear? How does that help researchers "find and share local records"? How is that "meaningful", "useful" or "accurate"?
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I do hope you are not tacitly agreeing with this action, Gordon. (Otherwise, I don't want to shoot the messenger!) If that is the reasoning behind the change it is totally flawed, as David explains.
Users requests are being met for all kinds of additional standard locations, places even being added within a single town(ship) - especially cemeteries - so how can that be justified when this type of action is being taken?
Now, if the "United Kingdom" suffix were to be removed as the standard for its constituent countries (from 1801) I'd be quite happy, as - say - England was, and is, the same place before and after 1801. But changing the facts, primarily to stop inexperienced users getting confused, is an awful action that needs to be reversed immediately.
This might not be "an error", but it is a big mistake.
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Nope. Just passing along the Help Center article. I'll leave the debating to others.
I will take the opportunity to point out that no matter what one thinks of the change, it was nice that they did post their reasoning for the change. That doesn't happen too often. @davidnewton2, you might want to post your concerns under the Places group. The right people are more likely to see it there.
I'll also take the chance to point out again, that as far as entering correct data in Family Tree, this change has minimal effect because we can still use Territory in the Territory name without any difficulty at all. Just type it in, put in a reason statement as to why it is needed, and link the place name to the standard that now covers both the territory and the state. That's what I'll be doing.
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I have now posted an item at https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/123608/please-reverse-the-recent-action-that-means-there-is-no-separation-of-u-s-states-and-territories/p1?new=1, in line with Gordon's suggestion that the "Places" group is the best section within Community in which to highlight this issue.
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And now they have blown away the District of Columbia and replaced it with D. C. This is in contradiction to normal states which are spelled out and never use the postal abbreviation.
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<sarcasm> I'm waiting for FamilySearch to collapse Russian Empire, USSR, and Ukraine into Russia. Simple, easy, every American knows what Russia is, right? Argh!!!!
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Gordon Collett wrote above "... and link the place name to the standard that now covers both the territory and the state."
I understand I can type in anything I want in Family Tree and post it but "link the place name" throws me. It sounds like you are saying to type in Hawaii Territory and then standardize it to Hawaii, United States. There is no 'linking' to be done in Family Tree. Are you suggesting doing the manual entry in Family Tree and then going into the Places database and adding an alternate place name to a state there?
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Typing Hawaii Territory and standardizing it to Hawaii is exactly what Gordon meant, @WDan5. Another way to say "standardize" is "link it to a standardized place", because that's all it is: an association between the text entered and a location in the places database.
Think of the places database as a collection of latitudes and longitudes for places where people live or lived, along with various labels for those coordinates. (For simplicity's sake, I'm ignoring the fact that sometimes the coordinates are wrong in the database.) Some places can be adequately described with a single sequence of jurisdictions: "Thousand Oaks, Ventura, California, United States" has been named that, in that county and that state, for as long as the place has officially existed. (Technically, it wasn't incorporated until the 1960s, but the name was the result of a contest in the 1920s.) Other places need several different labels corresponding to major changes in jurisdiction: Dunaszerdahely, Pozsony county, Hungary became Dunajská Streda, Dunajská Streda district, Czechoslovakia in 1920, and then became Dunajská Streda, Dunajská Streda district, Slovakia in 1993. My grandfather was born on a farm belonging administratively to the town; I don't expect a small farm like this to appear in the database, but it doesn't need to: I can enter his birthplace as "Ádori majorság, Dunaszerdahely, Pozsony, Hungary", and associate it with the town using the label "Dunaszerdahely, Pozsony, Hungary".
The set of labels for Dunaszerdahely is somewhat simplified: in both Czechoslovakia and Slovakia, there was/is an administrative level between the district and the country. However, the people working on FS's database for this region have elected to simplify life and omit that level (probably because the boundaries and names keep getting rearranged). But if I so desired, I could enter "Dunajská Streda, Dunajská Streda, Trnava, Slovakia" and standardize it as "Dunajská Streda, Dunajská Streda, Slovakia". This is analogous to typing "Hawaii Territory" and associating it with the (over-)simplified standard of "Hawaii".
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I was afraid of that. So he was saying do extra typing and then throw it away and ignore the chronology of Hawaiian statehood. I get typing one thing and then selecting something slightly different because it is the only thing FS has had time to define and what you are choosing is the best available option at the time, but I don't think referring to the Kingdom of Bohemia as Czechia is really going to cut it.
As to your idea of the place name being an alias for a lat/long coordinate the problem there is larger units. The concept works fine for a neighborhood, village or city but let's stipulate that you would be using what I used to call the centroid of the shape of the entity since the Places database cannot define every point on the shape border. But where is the centroid of the Missouri Territory as opposed to the centroid of the State of Missouri? Or the centroids of Bohemia, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, Czechia, and Slovakia?
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Just to be clear, I don't always want to refer to a particular city. Sometimes (census record birth states come to mind) I can only refer to Missouri.
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Typing Hawaii Territory and standardizing it to Hawaii is exactly what Gordon meant
Yup.
And my grievance with this issue is that so often the actual place in the field and the displayed standard place do not match. The computer or some transcriber or prior contributor to Family Tree has messed up. So I must check every single place.
For that reason I make a point of editing the text in the field to the standard I select. That causes the map pin to appear in the text field and I know the place is, say, actually Hawaii the island not Hawaii the village in Guatemala.
This Hawaii mess is a good example of sloppy gazetteering. Places is full of duplicates and, conversely, gaps in coverage.
Wikipedia gives a thumbnail history with dates:
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In their herculean effort to create the absolutely best online genealogy service which has at least a dozen sometimes conflicting goals and purposes, tailored to those just starting out learning about their families and those certified, somewhat hidebound, genealogists with extensive experience who know the one and only way things are to be done; and to users who have never touched a computer before and those who first tapped on an Altair 8800; and to users scattered all over the globe speaking all sort of languages in all varieties of family configurations, the people at FamilySearch who view their work not just as a job or even a career, but as a calling, have taken some missteps and made some outright blunders. Two of these I am, for various reasons, somewhat passionate about dealing with.
First was their unwise use of a non-standard, unique, never before used definition for the word “standardize.” The common definition of this word is “cause (something) to conform to a standard.” In FamilySearch terminology, “standardize” does not mean this at all. Instead, it means “link entered data to a reference value in order to define for the computer program the meaning of the entered data.”
Second was the introduction of the map pin location icons on the detail pages in Family Tree. Too many people have misunderstood the purpose of the icons and view the presence of the icon as a holy grail that blesses the place name it is next to with a higher level of correctness that is to be achieved at all costs. Those map pins are totally unnecessary and often achieving them comes at the cost of data corruption and decreased accuracy.
@WDan5 , you wrote:
I understand I can type in anything I want in Family Tree and post it but "link the place name" throws me. It sounds like you are saying to type in Hawaii Territory and then standardize it to Hawaii, United States. There is no 'linking' to be done in Family Tree. Are you suggesting doing the manual entry in Family Tree and then going into the Places database and adding an alternate place name to a state there?…. So he was saying do extra typing and then throw it away….
You almost have the idea. You can enter any place name you need in Family Tree by doing a little extra typing (or setting up a hot key code for long place names you use repeatedly) and keeping it. Then you use the Places database to add/link the text version of the most appropriate latitude and longitude.
Here an extreme example of how this unique, powerful, elegant, misunderstood ability to enter a place name exactly as you need or want to have it and tell the program where that place is by linking to the Places database works to allow us to use the most accurate place name we can:
Clicking on the place name I want, which is the top line of the drop down menu enters it and links it to the second entry in the drop down menu. The drop down menu, not including that first line which is my entry, is the Places database. If that second line is not the right place to link to, I can change it after clicking on the top line.
After I click on the place name I want, the edit box looks like this:
As you can see by the green check mark and the green text, the place name is "standardized."
Clicking Save, I can now see the entered place name:
There is no map pin icon, but that is perfectly fine. The map pin icon has little meaning and is never needed. The pin means absolutely nothing when it comes to whether a place name is "standardized" or not.
As you can see here, the place name without the map icon may be highly preferred over the place name with the map icon. Also this shows how we are not limited by a database of “standards” that will never be complete and never be anywhere near comprehensive.
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Regarding your comments about latitude and longitude figures, these can be extremely accurate in the FamilySearch Places database, such as for the farm my wife’s father was born at:
The pin is sitting just a few yards from the house he grew up in.
However, the larger the area, the less accurate the latitude and longitude are going to be, of course. Is it even meaningful to speak of the latitude and longitude of Norway? The government of Norway states it is 69.63889 N, 30.56667 E on the map put out by the government’s department of mapping, putting a pin here:
That seems a bit strange, but it is their country so I guess they get the final say. They may be including all Norwegian territory, such as Svalbard, in their calculations. FamilySearch has chosen to use a more central point of 62.0000 N, 10.0000 E with their pin a bit more in the center of the country's main land mass:
Google Maps gives them as 63.4742817 N, 0.0871165 E while Wikipedia favors 61.0000 N, 8.0000 E.
If there is supposed to be an official way for determining the latitude and longitude of a place such as Missouri, then nations, Wikipedia, Google, and FamilySearch don't seem to agree on what it is. As far as FamilyTree is concerned, the purpose of latitude and longitude is give a numerical code for each point on the globe for use in program routine calculations since computers really only use numbers, not words. From that standpoint, as long as the pin on the timeline map looks pretty good, whether their numbers exactly match Google, Wikipedia or any other mapping service is not all that important.
If there are latitude and longitudes that just don’t make sense in the the FamilySearch Places database, you can request corrections. I’ve gotten several farms in Norway moved from the middle of fjords back onto land where they belong.
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Too many people have misunderstood the purpose of the icons
Like many aspects of Family Tree, the matching of place name to gazetteer seems to have been only roughly thought out before release and its proper function defined later.
I learned Family Tree on the mobile app, which has influenced my perception of how these icons are intended to be used.
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@WDan5, I should have reposted my presentation that goes into painful detail of how place names, "standards," and the Places database currently work which is how they have worked ever since Family Tree first opened.
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By the way, adding place names on the mobile app works exactly the same.
1) Type in the entire name:
2) Click on the top line, not the second one, to enter the place name you want:
3) You can see if you open to the editing screen for the place name that both the desired place and its linked "standard" are present:
Once again, that map icon is not needed against the actual place name. It does not mean the place name is correct or that the place name is correctly "standardized." It only means that someone decided to use the "standard" for the place name either because it was correct for the situation or was good enough for the situation.
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