Stop loss of address information due to standardising
Can I suggest that standardising of places be shown as an additional entry rather than a replacement of details. We have so much more details of where our relatives live in these times. I have many addresses for family events through purchasing birth certs or from family members memories that I find it very disappointing that someone should then standardise it and all these relevant personal details are then being lost. Bringing addresses down to a basic City or town etc are so impersonal and not what someone wants to see in their family history. Having the additional entry for the standardisation will still then allow the data to be recognised by a computer sorting system as it is needed now.
Mr T Williams
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Family Tree does, in fact, work exactly as you are requesting. All place names are entered twice in Family Tree as 1) the user entered free-form place name that can contain just as much information as we need or want and 2) the linked reference value that comes from the Places database that provides the unique latitude and longitude needed for all computer routines.
There are just a few problems:
- The unfortunate choice of the term "standard" which implies a higher level of correctness and makes people think they are required to use the "standard." A more neutral term such as "reference value" would have been better.
- The unfortunate design decision to hide the linked reference value aka standard when the user entered free-form name is identical to that reference value which again makes people think, agai that somehow having only the standard is required.
- Nowhere in the help center that I have been able to find does any article correctly and clearly explain how to enter place names.
Too many people just don't realize or refuse to accept the flexibility we have been provided with in Family Tree for entering the best, most descriptive, and accurate place information that we possibly can.
I agree with you fully and don't understand why some people insist that only this place name is correct:
when we can enter:
Some people insist the lower version is not "standardized" even though the lower screen shot states "Standardized Data" right there showing that it is standardized and even though when entering or editing the data it shows:
and declares with a bright green check mark that the place is standardized.
It would be easier to convince people of this two entry function of Family Tree if both fields were always shown even when they are identical like this:
Since the help center is so unclear about how to enter place names, I put together my own presentation. Feel free to send the link to it to everyone who removes any information from a place name you have entered.
----- https://youtu.be/qLa5PC4RPPk
Part of the trouble, of course, is that we are battling decades worth of tradition and obsolete "best practices" that were developed based on the limited data processing power available when using paper forms a hundred years ago. Even when PAF came out forty years ago, and which some people are still using, places names were limited to four parts with a maximum of 16 characters in each part. Computers have improved a bit since then.
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Thank you so much for the information and method, I shall send the information to all who removes information and hopefully they might see the errors of their ways.
Terry
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Following up to this I had a recent conversation on line regarding the above. After guiding them to this conversation their reply went as below.
Terry
Can you please not reduce address details to just a basic town. An address can be standardised to still keep the full information. Thank you, Terry
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nasears 7:04 PM
Addresses can go down in the notes, to keep the town field clear.
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Terry 22 SEPTEMBER 20239:40 AM
Maybe if you personally want that but I don't. I had brought the standardising matter of addresses up in the family search community https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/149760/stop-loss-of-address-information-due-to-standardising/p1
Maybe you can read it and with that in mind do not change any of the details I have input.
At the end of the reply it states Since the help center is so unclear about how to enter place names, I put together my own presentation. Feel free to send the link to it to everyone who removes any information from a place name you have entered.
----- https://youtu.be/qLa5PC4RPPk
Part of the trouble, of course, is that we are battling decades worth of tradition and obsolete "best practices" that were developed based on the limited data processing power available when using paper forms a hundred years ago. Even when PAF came out forty years ago, and which some people are still using, places names were limited to four parts with a maximum of 16 characters in each part. Computers have improved a bit since then. Thanks Terry
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nasears 2:26 PM
I was unable to follow your link as the page didn’t connect. I understand your reasoning m but respectfully disagree. Why make a big deal of it? Putting a n
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nasears 2:32 PM
address down in the comments will enable us to keep the town name in standard format and still retain the extra information you’d like to preserve. I think the reason we have standard format is so all person pages look clean and uniform. Adding an address in on some pages defeats that purpose. However, I will try to avoid changing any of your particular additions.
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nasears 2:34 PM
PS. I was trained to “clean house” in this way by an employee of Family Search, who was in charge of training other employees.
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Terry 2:59 PM
The reason I want it left is so that when a print of persons details is made it shows on the the sheet the exact details that was input amongst other things. Looking clean and uniform is not any use to a family historian. Here is the link again https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/149760/stop-loss-of-address-information-due-to-standardising/p1
I think the last time you tried to view it you missed off the https://community.
Please try again and get back to me again afterwards with your thoughts.
Thank you for agreeing to avoid changing any of my additions
Terry
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nasears 6:40 PM
I am sorry, but again I must respectfully disagree, based on my instructions from my Family Search trainer. She said that clean and uniform pages were the whole point of going to a standard format. It was a mess when everyone was doing their own thing, and she made us promise to “clean up” any all caps words, duplicates, etc from any person page we visited and change things to their standard formats. She said she personally spends about 55% of her time on Family Search doing just that.
This is a public forum. Most of us who use it are amateur genealogists, not historians. Following standard formats keeps it organized and easier for everyone to understand the information. I am sure that if Family Search wants us to included addresses in the town field, they will let us know. Until then, we may both have legitimate reasons for feeling the
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nasears 6:40 PM
way we do, so let this be the end of this conversation.
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"Clean House", "clean and uniform pages were the whole point of going to a standard format", "I am sure that if Family Search wants us to included addresses in the town field, they will let us know". Surely not looking nice should not trump accuracy.
Maybe Family Search trainers whoever they are be brought up to date with standardising concepts. Would they like to give their views in a reply to this. As far as I see it the baby is being thrown out with the bath water with all the details being lost.
Time for FamilySearch to "let us know"
Mr T Williams
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Well, that was frustrating to read! I suspect that that FamilySearch employee trainer has been doing genealogy for a long time, never had the thought occur to him that more information could be added to place names than the standard has, and that the question of how to include an address never came up.
Your conversation echos those that were common ten years ago regarding cemetery names in the battles between those who wanted to include it in the burial place and those who insisted the name only go in the notes because "it isn't in the standard." Those battles got resolved when FamilySearch started an ongoing project to add cemeteries to the Places database.
It really is hard for some people to break with tradition and realize how programming has improved. They never seem to wonder that if we are never to include additional place information, then why have the Family Tree programmers made it so easy to do?
Regarding that we are to "clean house" in Family Tree. That is true. But cleaning a house means to dust, sweep, vacuum, throw out garbage, and generally straighten up. It does not mean throw out all the furniture and anything hanging on the walls!
For example, fifty years ago:
1) All names were to be combined in a single line - Elizabeth "Beth" "Lizzy" Smith (Jones).
We are to clean house by putting one full name in vitals and all nick names, married names, and other name changes under other information.
2) Dates were to be to entered correctly - 22 FEB 1920.
We are to clean house by entering them correctly - 22 February 1920.
3) Place names were to use the standard genealogical abbreviations and get rid of as many vowels and unneeded consonants as possible and not include USA since the state name makes the country name redundant - Salt Lake, S-LK, UT
We are to clean house by putting in the full place name - Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, United States.
We are to clean house by taking all the information imported into FamilyTree which came from various databases that followed now obsolete standards and bring it up to current standards which includes the ability we have been provided with to include as much additional information in a place name as we need for accuracy, precision, and historical value.
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This should be a matter of preference. If there were an official preference setting called something like "Display Standardized Places for all Events", then the person who wants it all "clean and uniform" could see it that way, while a different person could leave that preference off, and thus see the full data in the "free-form" place. Of course, it should show both when actually editing.
I also agree that "standardized" is an unfortunate and ambguous choice of terminology for this situation.
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I just have trouble understanding why anyone would have a preference for the screen shot on the left over the screen shot on the right and what is "unclean and non-uniform" with the screen shot on the right.
If this person had moved to four different cities in these censuses, would we remove the city names and leave just the state because the entries were no longer uniform?
Why do people insist on rejecting the ability Family Tree gives us to include the full richness of our relatives' lives in a simple, clear manner?
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Thank you @Gordon Collett !!! I agree. I started to type a list of ways addresses are valuable information to a researcher, but it is just too many and it got too long and wordy. Don't dumb down the location display.
My general rule of thumb:
If FamilySearch provides a field that allows the entry of any information complying with the definition of the field purpose, then stop deleting it because YOU don't like it. Only exceptions I can think of: if it violates the Code of Conduct.
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I could try to battle further by picking up on the line from the protestor:
"...Addresses can go down in the notes, to keep the town field clear. ..."
Really? What notes would these be? The Notes on the Collaborate tab are (figuratively speaking) miles away from the events that they might refer to and are therefore ineffective. What most people (including myself) do is to use the free-text box on each event / attribute for occasional notes. Yet this is actually headed "Reason This Information Is Correct". If that's what is meant, then how does (say) "5 High St." explain why the information is correct?
Either suggestion is downright poor, especially if the suggestor contends that they are complying with the rules of the game.
But in reality this is pointless - we can apply all the logic we like, but people like the protestor consider that they are the guardians of the truth.
As @Terrence A Williams effectively says, we need FamilySearch (a) make a decision and (b) to disseminate that decision via training materials, starting with its own trainers, that discuss things like having a display value of place or date that differs from the standardised value, and explaining that this is the correct way of doing these things.
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"She said she personally spends about 55% of her time on Family Search doing just that."
In other words, by her own admission, she spends more than half of her time on FS destroying data.
I agree with everything Adrian just wrote, but especially the part about FS needing to give (much) clearer instruction _starting with its own trainers_. It is a truly sad state of affairs that the people who are supposed to be the experts are actually even more clueless than the rank beginners (because the experts think they know, while the beginners know they don't).
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I'm slightly torn on the issue.
On the one hand, having the addresses present can be helpful to research, or even just fun to know. If you are willing to do the research, it can tell you how your ancestor may have lived, or fill in details of their lives that you otherwise may not have known.
On the other hand, filling the location in with a bunch of numbers and street names can make the location feel unreadable, and, to be frank, quite ugly. I suspect that there are a lot of errors that exist because someone had trouble reading the real location.
There has to be a compromise somewhere, but I personally don't know what the best solution would be.
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It was a mess when everyone was doing their own thing, and she made us promise to “clean up” any all caps words, duplicates, etc from any person page we visited and change things to their standard formats. She said she personally spends about 55% of her time on Family Search doing just that.
To be fair, most of us are probably still spending more that 55% of our time in Family Tree "cleaning house" by changing SMITH to Smith, merging the dozens of duplicates the IGI contains, and changing things to standard formats such as replacing NYC, NY with New York City, New York, United States.
The only trouble here is that it sounds like her trainer was one of the old "if it doesn't have a map pin it isn't correct" crowd who have never understood the role and purpose of "standardizing" or as I now like to refer to it, "linking to a reference value."
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@BraydenGraves said
... On the other hand, filling the location in with a bunch of numbers and street names can make the location feel unreadable, and, to be frank, quite ugly. ...
The ones that I do admit to deleting are the wards, and electoral divisions etc. off censuses. They're not visible on the ground, they change every so often, etc.
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On the other hand, filling the location in with a bunch of numbers and street names can make the location feel unreadable, and, to be frank, quite ugly.
Does no one get mail anymore? Does no one send letters anymore? Is reading addresses a lost skill? Does no one see the advantage that if you have the full address right there:
You can easily highlight and copy the whole thing:
Then paste it into google and, if it still exists, immediately see exactly where a relative lived?
But to step away from address for a moment or any type of additional information, for people who insist that only the standardized version of a place name is correct, they need to be reminded that for much of the world the Places database is still woefully incomplete or just wrong. For example, checking the first twenty places that come up under the county of Sogn og Fjordane, Norway (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?reqParents=5942&reqParentsLabel=County%20(Top%20level)&reqParentsType=521&includeIsParent=true&primaryText=Sogn%20og%20Fjordane%2C%20Norway&searchTypeaheadInputText=Search%20Within%3ASogn%20og%20Fjordane%2C%20Norway&partial=undefined ):
All but three of them are wrong because they are all missing the municipalities these places are in. In fact, doing some quick filtering, there are 1857 places listed in this county (which is too few there are 26 municipalities in the county, each with about 80 places within them so there should be over 2000) , and about 1600 are wrong because they don't have the municipality.
To record any of them correctly in Family Tree you have to add that critical but missing information, for example as Aardal, Lærdal, Sogn o Fjordane, Norway, and link it correctly to the incorrect standard. (Yes, the Places team are fully aware of these issues and such things are gradually being corrected but this is a very long term project. And sending a letter to that team to please add the 250 or more missing places and correct all the 1600 incorrect places is not going to speed things up any.)
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@Gordon Collett Yes, you can put the addresses into google maps. But nine times out of ten, knowing the exact location they lived is irrelevant to research. Putting the general location into google will usually give you everything you need. If you need the exact location, you can always check the sources, or, if there are none for that information, the notes or memories. (If none are there, then the address probably shouldn't be either) I usually leave the address, just because it CAN be useful, but it also feels like unnesesary clutter sometimes.
I'm also not saying that you should standardize it to the wrong location. I've had to un-standardize places quite a few times.
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As with many issues with FSFT, there are complex factors contributing to the problem.
One that has been mentioned is Notes. FS has never implemented the (Gedcom) standard that prescribes a Note that can be attached to basically any data item and that a single Note can be attached to multiple items. With such, there could be a Note that is attached to the Place, and it wouldn't be "far away".
However, I don't think that really solves the problem. I must reiterate that I think it comes down to "display preferences". @Gordon Collett doesn't see why someone would not want to see the full Place information when such information exists. That is fine. That is his preference. Other people have other preferences (misguided as they may be....). We can never get everybody to agree on what is "proper" or "useful", so we need to provide some options, where there seem to be "majorly-diverging" opinions.
Most desktop genealogy programs have/had options to select various display options for Places. Granted this is usually in the case of Reports or Place Lists. (for example, you can elect to break apart the Place jurisdications into columns, hide any of those jurisdictions, re-order them, etc.) Some options like that could be implemented in "summary" displays (like a Tree node or Search results), but when it comes to editing that Place, the full Place would be displayed, as well as the "Standardized". The full place should probably be displayed also in the display of Places in the Vitals section of a Person profile.
Format should not dictate or limit Content.
Allowing display preferences for Places, does run the risk that "less-experienced" users will think that what they see is "the entirety" of the Place". Of course, should they "drill down" to the Person page and/or editing, they will see the full place. (Displaying the full Place should be the default, so any deviation from that would be because the user specifically, and hopefully "knowingly", set the preference to something else.) (As noted below, I think there should be an option icon/button next to the place, both to indicate whether it is displaying summarized or full information and allowing one to change the display option.)
I agree with Gordon that the entry and editing of Places has been rather bungled, and is unintuitive and severely under-documented. I do think it has improved over the years, but only for those that actually understand how it works.
Personally, the preference that I would love to see is the option to reverse the order of jurisdictions, both for entry and display. I know this goes against the ingrained habits of thousands who are accustomed to writing addresses as "Building Number, Street, City, County/District, State/Province, Country" (which is not at all a universal standard), but logically, the reverse is much more efficient for data entry and for "scanning through" a set of displayed Places. Of course, I would not subject everyone to this preference, but given the option, it is the one I would personally choose. (Country, State/Province, County/District, City, Street, Building Number, with the option to hide certain jurisdicitions) Actually, I would probably choose data entry to be Country-first, Address-last, but display to be Address-first (or possibly hidden), with Country last. This might be disorienting for some people, but they could choose what works for them. This lets me select the order that I personally find most useful and allows me to specify what kind of "clutter" I can tolerate in any given situation. Next to each place would be the option button to quickly switch to a full place display with the desired ordering. Possibly the shape and color of the icon could indicate whether I am seeing less the the full Place information. If I don't want to see the same Country repeated over and over, I can (temporarily) hide it from display. A street address, arguably the most "cluttering" bit of data, could be "relegated" to the end of the Place Name or hidden: it is there when I need it, but I don't have to search through a potentially long string of text to find the City in the middle.
(Note: having data-entry with Places that enter Country-first would probably allow it to more quickly provide reasonable "drop-down" choices... but it would probably not work with a single entry field, rather it would need to have separate fields for each jurisdiction that default to the previous or most recently-used values.)
As long as FS refuses to provide easily-accessible (for each on-screen data field), comprehensive, online documentation of procedures, processes and policies for Family Tree, etc., we will always be fighting the battle of both users and trainers not knowing the "latest right way to do things". It is a moving and under-documented target! They have a hard enough time keeping the articles to date. Keeping abreast of teaching "new tricks" to "us old dogs" (I include myself), is even more difficult!
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@David Peterson I think you may be right about reversing the order of localities. The thing that's bothered me the most when people include the address is that it makes it harder to find the information that you actually want to use. (Especially since different people include different amounts of information!) But if what I actually want is always one of the first localities listed, the problem would be negated entirely. Essentially, you could expand it all you wanted and it would still be as if it was only using the Country/State/City format. (I know that's a massive oversimplification, but you get the point.)
It would still look visually cluttered, but oh well.
(Actually, on that note, they could have it so it just shows the essential information by default, and you could click a button to show the rest. By "essential", I refer to the town/city and anything broader than that. That would fix the clutter issue, but I think it would only look good with the reverse order you suggested, because otherwise everything would have to be pushed out of the way when you click the button.)
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@David Peterson - Good thoughts about a complex issue. In particular, "Format should not dictate or limit Content" pretty much sums up why the Places database will never sufficiently or completely include all possible requirements for place names which returns to the heart of this discussion: if a researcher has included more complete or complex data for a date or place that properly adds precision, accuracy, or value to that item, no one should remove that addition in the name of "standardization."
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Heh, it would be ...funny, if a genealogy site used Hungarian logic in places/addresses... (Addressing a letter within Hungary, you write the recipient's name, then the town, then the street name followed by the house number and the floor/apartment designations, and then, as an afterthought, the postal code.)
FS's Catalog uses largest-to-smallest ("Country, County, City") ordering, but you can start typing at any jurisdiction and then choose the one you want from the drop-down. This is handy if you don't remember the full jurisdiction(s). (It's also a handy way to find out how many different Springfields there are.) The matching algorithm has its quirks and pitfalls (if I type it as one word but it's cataloged with a hyphen, then it claims to have no matches), but in many ways, it is vastly superior to the one used for the Places database. (That one claims "no results" for intermediate steps: "Balassag" through "Balassagyarma" all have "No Results To Show", "Balassagyarmat" has two.)
I haven't encountered profiles with extensive extra information in the place fields. (Most of my ancestors had a house-number within a town, if that. Only cities had named streets, and even in those, some people lived in unnumbered houses.) The closest I've gotten is my current rabbit hole of a rabbit hole, where the (bare and uninformative) placename entered for events turned out to be the name of a castle or palace. One of them is in the database (as a "populated place"), the other one isn't. I've been amending them to add the jurisdictions; for the one that's not in the database, I've been adding "Schloß" before the name, just to make it clear that it's not a village or town. I'm sure this would contradict some people's sense of order, but would appeal to other pedants like me.
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With @Julia Szent-Györgyi comments about Hungarian addresses and @David Peterson comments about his actual preference and having seen the excellent programming skills of FamilySearch's designers, I started to wonder just what is possible in Family Tree. I only did one test but tried to pick a city that had a relatively common name and found that if you want to go Country, State, County, City in place names, it works just fine:
I only got two choices to link my entry to. This is analogous to Family Tree's acceptance of ISO format dates with no ambiguity at all:
Given a final display of:
So, David, if you want to go ahead and follow your preferred manner of entering place names, you can. If enough people come to accept that that is a more useful way of displaying place names, you may be able to cause a shift in the usual practice so that in twenty years it becomes "the standard." That is how standards evolve. And if I ever run across your entries, I'll leave them alone.
I'll leave it to Julia to test this out for Hungarian places and to decide if one really should follow Hungarian practice and enter all place names within Hungary in this manner.
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(Why is there always on more typo? I'm still not convinced the editing problem when there are images is totally fixed so I'm not going to edit my post and risk the images vanishing. Sorry.)
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Oh, almost forgot to check. Adding extra information to the end of the place name doesn't confuse the routine at all:
Personally I find this harder to read, but that is just a matter of familiarity and practice.
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