Need for Standardized community name

LegacyUser

Arne Pedersen said: There is a need for Hedalen, Oppland, Norway to be made a Standard recognized community. Personally I have entered several hundred names of people who have been born in this valley with it's own ancient stave church and many farms, but the only option I have is to write Oppland , Norway, for the county. This is not good enough. Oppland is a count more than 200 km long.

LegacyUser

Juli said: It's in the database as Hedal rather than Hedalen: https://www.familysearch.org/research...

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome back to the Get Satisfaction community for FamilySearch.

What you write for a place is up to you. It does not have to match the standard name.

LegacyUser

Brett said: Arne

Here is some additional details:

'Google' "Maps"

Hedalen, Oppland, Norway

Hedalen
3528
Norway

Hedalen is both a valley and a rural village in the Sør-Aurdal municipality in Oppland. The valley is next to Bengadalen.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/352...

WikiPedia

Hedalen

Hedalen is both a valley and a rural village (Norwegian: bygd) in the Sør-Aurdal municipality in Oppland. The valley is next to Bengadalen. The village, characterized by coniferous forests, agricultural properties and scattered private housing, extends west and northwards towards Vassfaret from Nes i Ådal, which lies along European route E16 at the north end of Sperillen in Ringerike municipality in Buskerud. The conservation area Vassfaret is partially in Hedalen, and partially in Flå in Buskerud. From Hedalen, a toll road goes in to Aurdalsdammen, and Nevlingen in Vassfaret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedalen

AND,

As 'Juli' has already indicated, in FamilySearch, in the Place Names Database, it appears as 'Hedal', rather than 'Hedalen', which seems to be the case.

Here are some additional details:

Hedal Parish, Oppland, Norway Genealogy
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/...

Hedal Stave Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedal_S...

By the way, you might what to post this request within FamilySearch itself, in the "Community.FamilySearch" Forum, in the 'Group' of "FamilySearch Places":

https://community.familysearch.org/s/...

If you have not already, you may need to "Join" the "Community.FamilySearch" Forum in FamilySearch.

I hope this helps.

Brett

.

LegacyUser

Juli said: The volunteer working on Norwegian placenames is Gordon Collett, who is pretty active here, so there's probably no need to repost.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: One trouble with discussion boards like this, is that we really don’t know who we are talking to and what they already know. That is why I would rather apologize for starting really basic and working up rather than assume people know more than me and give way too short of an answer.

So first some basics.

In this discussion, I will be sticking with the Norwegian terms “prestgjeld” and “sogn” for the the purpose of clarity. I’ve posted this chart before:



In the historical parish records, a sogn is the smallest ecclesiastical division in Norway. Each has one church. A prestegjeld is the next division up and consists of one to several sogn. In the older parish records there is often only one church record book per prestegjeld so it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to know in which sogn a family lived or an event took place because it was just not recorded. Later records often have a Ministerialbok which covers the entire prestgjeld and Klokkerboks which each cover one sogn.

Presgjeld and sogn were established in the middle ages sometime and were the main boundaries dividing Norway into sections that we are interested in for genealogy. In 1838 municipalities (kommune) were established as divisions of the civil government. In all the areas I have ever worked in, these initial municipalities were named after and exactly followed the boundaries of the corresponding prestegjeld. As boundaries changed up thorough the years, most of the time these ecclesiastical and civil boundaries stayed in sync at least up through the early 1900s.

Because of this consistency in boundaries, when you see a place name like Stord, Hordaland, Norway. You don’t know, and don’t need to know, if this is Stord prestegjeld or Stord municipality because the boundaries are the same from 1838 through today. This is why you will find these divisions in the Places database as municipalities, not parishes.



I will not go into the hows and whys of place name standardization here, but will refer you to my presentation at:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/...

In Family Tree, my personal preference for recording place names is to use:
Farm, Prestegjeld, County, Country
because it can be hard to know the sogn, as mentioned above.

Some people do use:
Farm, Sogn, Prestegjeld, County, Country

I have never seen and would never recommend recording a place name as
:
Farm, Sogn, County, Country
since this leaves out such a major geographic division.

If an event took place in a church, then you do know which sogn that event took place in, but that does not mean that the family lived in that sogn. So for events such as christening, I record the event place name as
Church, Prestegjeld, County, Country
Almost always the church and the sogn have the same name.

Now to get to the point of all this. I’ve spent some time studying up on Hedalen and have learned that this name is applied to three things: 1) The valley of Hedalen, 2) the sogn Hedalen, 3) and the village Hedalen. The name appears to only have two spelling variants Hedalen and Hedal. The -en ending is just the … [truncated]