Place name standardization
Comments
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I just received a notice "changes to people you follow"
20 entries I then had to check one by one to see what the change was.
It took quite a while, but I realized it was the same person changing things in all different parts of my family tree.
Basically alot of places in London England, changed to Middlesex England. Ok, so they were technically correct, but I like to put London instead of Middlesex, as that is where it is NOW and I need this to know this to know to look for the records (London Archives). And to make sense of things as I'm in North America.
I have done this kind of editing for others in your helping section and have tried to keep my tree accurate so that others (non relatives) don't change things. I only reviewed d the locations for my ancestors and their siblings, close relatives like that, but I would like to do it for all relatives connect to me. I may have missed some.
I think it would be a nice option for me to click a link and do the standardized location editing for my OWN family. I would look a things more closely and learn. Others who edit to Standard Locations could get things wrong, I would have some extra knowledge for my family and should be less likely to make a mistake.
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I understand completely. Typically it is considered most correct to use the historic name for locations which was in use when the record was created, but I often violate that and for similar reasons to the ones you give. I use Ukraine instead of Russian Empire for sources from the mid to early 1800s just so people know where I am talking about. The historic place name down to the town level doesn't exist any more so very few people would have any idea where Selz, Kutschurgan, Russian Empire was. Also when it comes to Virginia vs Kentucky, I tried for years to change records so that locations said Virginia up to and including the first 6 months of 1792 because collections used to be organized by the political unit which created them. However in the past 2-3 years (maybe this was a COVID thing) record collections are now organized by the current location and not historic. Thus, many, many Virginia marriage and court records for years prior to 1792 are housed in Kentucky and even West Virginia collections, (WV was created in 1863). So that aligns with your London argument.
I suspect that place names is an issue that never satisfy everyone. If I were you I would simply go back to those facts and edit the place name back to what you want and add a comment to the notes area politely asking that it not be changed in the future and give the reason why.
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There are different approaches to place names for historical events and people do debate which is the best way to do things. One approach is to always record the place name as it was at the time of the event. The other is to record the current place name. The third is to record both. See: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Recording_a_Place_Name_in_a_Genealogy_Program for a discussion of this.
This article in the FamilySearch Wiki states that FamilySearch's current recommendation is "to use the locality as found in FamilySearch Places as the standard place name used in Family Tree." This statement, unfortunately is woefully incomplete and deceiving. The Places database is far complete and currently has quite a few errors. However, the goal with the Places database is to have all historical periods correctly in place so the correct historical name can be used. Also, we are not limited to place names in that database but should use the most accurate place name possible.
Currently for London there are three choices in the Places database:
Are you saying that you are using one these for people that lived outside the city limits in the county of Middlesex and so really did not live in London? I think most people would view that as incorrect. And in that case I would agree with the person who changed these to just Middlesex. If they did not live in London, you should not say that they did.
What you could do is put in a reason statement: "When these people were alive, they lived outside the city of London. However the area has since been annexed into the city and records for them will be found in the London Archives. If trying to visit the location, the current address for it is ....."
Or if you don't want to hide things in a reason statement, then you can make use of the full power of Family Tree and be perfectly clear:
This could be linked to either Middlesex, England or London, England standard and the program will function perfectly well.
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Yeah, there's a whole load of things going on with "London", starting with - What do you actually mean by London? (Because the City of London is not the same thing as London...)
Also, there's no doubt that the practical, everyday naming of "London" was ahead of the legislation. The metropolitan area got called London way before the legislation created a jurisdiction of that name. For instance, one of the earliest railways into the capital was the London & Birmingham - not the Camden & Birmingham, which is where, IIRC, Euston Station was built. Heck, even the census didn't believe the legislation because it created a "London" area out of Middlesex and Surrey.
One option is, as @Gordon Collett suggests, to use the full ability for FS FamilyTree to add extra text to a placename leaving the standardised version with the time-matched value but the display name according to a more belt-and-braces approach.
For instance, in Beta, I just set up an event with a standardised placename of
Islington, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom
(this would match the official jurisdiction of my theoretical event) but a display placename of
Islington, London, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom
(which would be a practical, everyday reference to London).
I suggest that would be a profitable avenue to explore - I will always try to stick "London" into such placenames as I, from the North of England, can never remember whether these places were within the metropolis of the time or out in the countryside.
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The FreeBMD website is useful in identifying from when a place would have no longer been in a "home county" - e.g. Middlesex, Essex or Surrey - and its jurisdiction became "London". Some places switched their jurisdiction in the 1880s or 1890s, whereas others not until 1965. This is notwithstanding their postal address (in the case of somewhere like West Ham) might have been London (E15) well before 1965, when it became part of the borough of Newham, Greater London, instead of being in the county of Essex.
The usual practice is to record a place as it was known at the time of the event in question. So, in this example, I would record a 1948 birth as having taken place in West Ham, Essex, but a 1980 death as having occurred in West Ham, London. Having said that, FamilySearch does not always have a comprehensive list of places on its "Standards" database that enables one to pick the location name as appropriate for a particular time period. (Although I just checked, and with my "West Ham" example it does do rather well!)
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As various people have said, the genealogical standard is to use the name-and-jurisdiction that applied at the time of the event, because that's an unchanging historical fact. However, none of the major genealogy websites follow this standard: FS's indexes generally use the name at the time of indexing, Ancestry uses a weird mix of modern and Frankenstein's-monster in its indexes and card catalog, and MyHeritage uses strictly current names for its mapping features.
I've been making use of FS's flexibility lately for entering late-20th-century events in Marosvásárhely, a city that's now in Romania. I can never quite remember how to spell its Romanian name, and I always have a moment of doubt whether I've got the right place when it's in Romanian -- so I've been typing in Marosvásárhely, selecting what I typed, and letting the standard be the top item on the drop-down list, which is the correct name-and-jurisdiction for post-1920 events. This way I get the best of both worlds: a displayed placename that I recognize (and can spell correctly), and a background value that matches the time of the event.
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After a couple of weeks or months editing records pertaining to people living in Sweden, I have the impression that most of the places I want to specify for my ancestors have not yet been added to the database. While there is a procedure to suggest names to be added, I haven't tried using it, since I find it extremely cumbersome and subject to individual habits as to which parent place to specify (I normally expect the parish to fill that role).
Is there a way to obtain statistics or lists of places already registered? That would help estimate what progress is being made, and when the database can be expected to be near completion for a particular country or territory.
In the 1880 Swedish census database, there are over 120,000 different places of residence listed (with a national population of less than five million, that's around 40 residents per place on average). After removing some labels that aren't really locations, I believe the remaining places could be added in batches. Expecting volunteer editors to "suggest" 100,000 places to be added one by one is going to take forever. That procedure is more suitable for occasional corrections.
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@AndersAndersson , Just another user here, but one way to see reference value places already registered is just to explore the Places database directly. Using the filters you can see how many places are direct children of large areas of Sweden, and how many direct children there are more localized areas.
For example, my wife and I both have relatives in Virestad, Kronoberg, Sweden, so I've gotten pretty familiar with the dozens of farms in Virestad.
Looking in the Places database: https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?reqParents=3468200&reqParentsLabel=Lutheran%20Parish&reqParentsType=313&includeIsParent=true&primaryText=Virestad%2C%20Kronoberg%2C%20Sweden&searchTypeaheadInputText=Search%20Within%3AVirestad%2C%20Kronoberg%2C%20Sweden&partial=undefined
there are 35 farms listed which looking at the map is maybe two thirds of them. I think it's more half.
What I don't know is if anyone is actively working in the area. I don't think so since they all have one citation from 2005 and one from 2009. So these were all added as part of the original build of the database for use in Family Tree.
You are right that it certainly would be more efficient to add one by one a set of places all in one locality . You might try requesting such as thing have all the farms in one parish added by e-mailing the Places team directly (whose e-mail I have forgotten) instead of requesting them one by one. How quickly they get added would depend on whether they have anyone working on Swedish places.
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I found their email: placefeedback@familysearch.org
The FamilySearch Research Wiki lists far more than 35 place names: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Virestad_Parish,_Kronoberg,_Sweden_Genealogy but I don't know how many of those are farms which should be in the database and how many are sections of farms that will not be.
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