Countries listed incorrectly
Hello,
My family is Polish yet I noticed that many families that are Polish are listed as German, Austrian and Russian.
This is because they were born between 1795-1918 when Poland was occupied by those countries.
The majority of people born during that time are Polish and should be listed correctly.
Especially Germany and the Russian empire tried to erase Poland. They forced people to learn German or Russian and renamed the streets and banned Polish media.
This is a very sensitive topic. Calling Polish families German is offensive.
It should be listed as "Occupied Poland" or "Partitioned Poland". Especially when you have the city and town names it's very easy to see that it's a Polish city or town.
Please correct your description as especially for people who don't know history this is very misleading.
Also it was not Austria which occupied Poland but the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Answers
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You can edit the place names in individual profiles with ease. You can force the site to accept exact spellings.
I do that all the times to get rid of English-centric spellings for Deutschland, Rheinland or Rheinprovinz, Rheinland-Pfalz, Bayern, Pfalz, etc. Even Preußen.
There is no such place name "Austro-Hungarian empire" It's just the "Austria-Hungary Empire".
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If you're talking about the "Birth Place" coloring option on the fan chart, it takes its groupings and labels from the final element of the standardized birthplace. So for example, my fan chart is basically monochrome, because I always use the jurisdiction that applied at the time of the event: "Felsőlövő, Vas, Hungary" rather than "Oberschützen, Oberwart, Burgenland, Austria", and "Dunaszerdahely, Pozsony, Hungary" rather than "Dunajská Streda, Dunajská Streda, Slovakia".
One problem with this setup is that it depends pretty heavily on the places database being correctly populated with appropriate labels/jurisdictions -- which is far from true, in many cases. Another problem is that labels can have multiple meanings. For example, "Austria" can mean the current country, or it can mean, essentially, Cisleithania: the parts of Austria-Hungary that aren't the Kingdom of Hungary. This earlier meaning of "Austria" encompassed fifteen different crown lands, such as Galicia and Silesia, but unfortunately, these crown lands are not entered into the database as top-level entities: they're always under Austria. (Labeled "district". I guess nobody else had "crown land" as an administrative level, and this was the closest they could come.) This means that you can't get your fan chart colored by "Silesia" versus "Galicia", because both of those will be labeled and colored as "Austria".
People with British ancestry face essentially the same problem: unless they choose standardized placenames from much earlier time periods, they can't tell their Welsh forebears from their English ones, because they're all labeled and colored as Great Britain.
I'm pretty lucky: the dismembered parts of Hungary can also be labeled Hungary, if I do things right, so the emotional aspects are satisfied. In Poland, you face the opposite problem: unless you use the modern jurisdiction, you get a top-level label with bad emotional associations. So one solution is to use the current name-and-jurisdiction for all of your birthplaces. This is actually a valid genealogical choice; it's what MyHeritage enforces, for example. It's not ideal, because it can be a moving target (as countries rearrange their administrations), but it has the advantage of making the place easy to find on modern maps -- and of ending in the correct country, in your case.
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