How do I report a problem with the Catalog location hierarchy?
When browsing the FamilySearch Catalog by place, jurisdictions with identical names are not distinguished when they occur at the same level of the place hierarchy.
For example, under United States → Maryland, the “Places within Maryland” list contains a single entry labeled BALTIMORE. Although Maryland has both Baltimore County and the independent City of Baltimore, selecting BALTIMORE resolves to Baltimore City. There is no separate entry for Baltimore County:
As a result, Baltimore County cannot be selected through the hierarchical place browser, and the cities and other places nested beneath Baltimore County (and the catalog entries associated with those locations) cannot be reached this way. Effectively, this removes all Baltimore County locations from the browsable Maryland hierarchy and makes them undiscoverable, because they can only be found by searching specifically for Baltimore County:
The same problem occurs with other identically named counties and independent cities, such as St. Louis County and St. Louis City, Missouri.
Suggested behavior:
Both jurisdictions should be separately selectable (for example, “Baltimore County” and “Baltimore City”), so that each branch of the place hierarchy remains accessible. Even a slightly jurisdictionally inaccurate workaround, such as nesting the independent cities within the counties of the same name for cataloging purposes, would be a functional improvement.
