Standardized Places
Hello everyone
I was shocked to find out how you give the freedom to people to enter whatever name that suited them. You only have to go at research places and key in St-Geneviève, Québec or Washington USA. It is getting out of hand and you should step into it. I will give you one example and look at it carefully and let me know if you could find those records easily. The name field that was entered is Sainte-Geneviève, Montreal, Lower Canada, British Colonial America. Family Search also have a tendancy to mix churches name with places name. The proper place name for this example is: Pierrefonds, Montréal, Québec, Canada and the church is Ste-Geneviève. It is quite simple: 1-the city, 2-the county, 3-the province, 4-the country. I will be attaching a documents of the province of Québec and you will see the names of he churches and when they were founded. I also have all of Canada if by any chance you are interested. Nothing against standardized places as long as Family Search keeps the control and add a drop down menu with the church name or city hall (civic) that will direct researchers. Also I beleive that a name is sacred. I would not dare translate your name or omit the accent. Are we trying too much to be politically correct???
Also my last issue is the choice of language. How do you change it? I tried a lot of ways and so far I didn't succeed. You see it is creating a probem because we could have two languages mixed up.
Family Search created a great association with Legacy. It is amazing the ease to exchange the information. Please do not ruin it. Put your foot down and take control of Standardized Place and stop the abuse and nonsense. The problem seem to be universal.
I can't send insert because it is a Word Document. Maybe somebody could give me an email where I could send that attacement.
Thanking you in advance
Daniel Dumais
Comments
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Community is a public online forum. For privacy reasons, your post was edited to remove your contact information. Please see the Community Code of Conduct for more details.
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I'm sorry, but I'm a bit confused as to exactly what area of FamilySearch you are talking about. Are you strictly referring to place names on a person's Family Tree detail page as entered by users? Are you discussing standardized values as found in the Places database? Are you referring to indexed records?
What names are sacred? Prior to the 1900s there was no such thing as standard spelling. People pretty much wrote a name however they felt like it. The Norwegian farm my wife's father's family lived for generations has been spelled Degernæs, Digranes, Digernes, and a couple of other ways in the records stretching from 1725 to 1900. "Correct" spelling of a name is a very modern invention.
When you say you are trying to change languages, do you mean for the website as a whole? To do that, you click on the globe icon in the top right corner of any page.
Just to make sure we start off discussing place names as used in Family Tree, you may want to view my presentation on the topic at: https://youtu.be/qLa5PC4RPPk Place names are not simple and the old genealogical forms and rules for using them, including that obsolete four part place name and nothing more rule, really oversimplified the whole issue. Fortunately, FamilySearch's wonderful innovations allows users to handle place names properly.
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Hello Mr Collett
Thank you for removing my email.
I will talk first about the language. When you click on the globe and and chose français it does not change the date to french. It retains what was entered. So you will see on the Family Tree detail page the dates in both languages.
Now I would like to talk about standardized values. The name as you put it is a modern invention and that modern invention, lets keep it in mind, is referring to all the past name changes and also referring us to legal documents either civic or religious. I will give you an example of Pierrefonds:
Pierrefonds Montréal Québec Canada Ste-Geneviève Cath. 1741
Pierrefonds Montréal Québec Canada Ste-Suzanne Cath. 1959
Pierrefonds Montréal Québec Canada St-David Cath. 1963
Pierrefonds Montréal Québec Canada Anglican Thorndale Prot. 1963
Pierrefonds Montréal Québec Canada Marie-Reine-de-la-Paix Cath. 1965
Pierrefonds Montréal Québec Canada St-Thomas-Becket Cath. 1965
Please keep a strong base of the city, county, province and country. If you could only add a drop down menu to accomodate the place of worship or civic. When I say a name is sacred I would not dare try to translate your name or remove or add accent to it. Right now you have lots of duplicate in the Places Database. I will leave it at that. One last thing could you remove this post from Google because my email is showing
Thank You
Dan
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@Daniel Dumais May I point out that this Community is primarily comprised of users of the FamilySearch website who try to help other users. Some of us may have some influence when we participate in discussions with the organization, but most of us have no power to change or fix the elements you are reporting.
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@Daniel Dumais You are not sending an email to FamilySearch support. You have posted in an online public forum. Everything you post here can be searchable. Here other users of the site can help one another with family history problems and questions. Due to the public nature of the discussion boards, we have asked users to not post information that can identify them. Please see #8 in unacceptable behaviors in the Code of Conduct. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/community-code-of-conduct
If you wish to email support, you can do so by clicking the circle with a ? in the top right of any FamilySearch or Community page, and then clicking Contact Us.
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Sorry if I was not clear that I am just another user of Family Tree.
One of the beauties of Family Tree is that a user such as yourself is completely at liberty to enter in place names the most accurate and complete place names you can in whatever language is most appropriate for the situation. This feature assumes that users who are researching their family will have the best familiarity with the locations their family lived and be able to put in the best place names. This user entered free-form place name is never changed by the Family Tree program or translated by it. The program does "not dare try to translate [a user entered] name or remove or add accent to it"
Standardized values are not the final word on a place name. They are merely a means to inform the program of the location of the user entered place name. They can be used to quickly enter the free-form names when appropriate and they are translated to help other users know, at least in close approximation, the meaning of the user entered place name.
To show how this works in terms of language translation, I'll take your example of the proper place name of:
Ste-Geneviève, Pierrefonds, Montréal, Québec, Canada
Here I have entered it with the website set to French:
Clicking on the data opens the Data View pop up where you can see both the user entered free-form place name and the linked standardized value:
As you rotate through languages, you can see that only the linked standard is translated, not the more complete user entered place name:
So feel free to enter accurate, complete place names in the proper language. They will be maintained as long as your relatives who are also working on your joint family agree that you have entered it correctly.
Another great innovation and feature of Family Tree is that they do allow complete place names in as much detail as is required for any situation whether that place name is made up of one, two, three, four, five, six or twenty parts. The limit of four part names was never more than an artifact of small paper forms then limited, primitive computer programming.
As you see areas in the Places database, which is where the standardized place names are found, you can post suggestions for improvements in the group for that such in Communities at: https://community.familysearch.org/en/group/68-familysearch-places The database is a work in progress as they work on compiling place names from the entire globe in all their historical time periods and in all appropriate languages. It is a very long term project to get all the names right in it and they are very open to suggestions for improvements even though it may take months to years to get those improvements incorporated in the database.
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