Please make "York, England" a standard place name

LegacyUser

Paul said: I was provided with the link https://www.familysearch.org/research... recently, but would be grateful if an employee could advise if this is the best way to overcome my problem.

I have just submitted the following via the above page:



Currently, I am having to change several hundreds of records, as place names that end in "York, England" are producing a data warning error - "Missing Standardized Christening Place", etc. This format was widely used in nFS, IGI and older records, but is no longer accepted in Family Tree - where the accepted standard for the county (and places therein) is "Yorkshire, England".

Incidentally, Yorkshire (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorkshire) is alternatively known as the "County of York", so such an addition should be acceptable.

Obviously, I cannot expect FamilySearch to re-title all its records (say from "Hutton Magna,York,England" to the currently standard "Hutton Magna,Yorkshire,England", but any solution will save much time for me and many fellow users who constantly add sources for this county to IDs in Family Tree.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Here are further screenshots illustrating the problem:

(1) Shows the format carried over, when the source was added, is not accepted as standard in FT


(2) Example of a current search / results page, shows results now show "Yorkshire" instead of "York"


(3) A similar results page of just a few months ago, then showing the same "York" format as in the source itself. However "York, England" has never been an accepted standard place name in Family Tree.


(4) Illustrates "York, England" is not an acceptable standard place name in Family Tree

LegacyUser

Paul said: Sorry if I am using the wrong terminology - I guess my request should be, "Please add... to the Standards list".

However, the fact remains that the change of "standard" county name by FamilySearch (York to Yorkshire) has created a huge problem.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Paul - I'm not sure if entering "York, England" as a county name would help... Isn't the problem that there are lots of placenames like "Whitby, York, England"?

I may be totally wrong here but I didn't think that "Whitby, York, England" would be affected by creating a county of "York England"?

Wouldn't they have to create standard placenames for "Whitby, York, England", "Sneaton, York, England", etc, etc, etc? Because I don't think that allowing "York, England" as a county name would automatically create or allow a standard of "Whitby, York, England"??

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: One problem is that "York, England" (with no type showing) is ambiguous.

York became a "County Corporate" aka "County of Itself" in 1396 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_... )

So there was (always) a "County of York, England" - aka "Yorkshire, England".

But, from 1396, there was also a "City & County of York, England" - which is just the city, with the extra bit in the title denoting that the city had some county level powers.

So there's nothing to say what exactly "York, England" (with no type showing) might be - the county? Or the much smaller city & county combined?

It is a bit of a ****

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: None of my comments / replies should be taken to mean that I don't understand that there is a serious problem here.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Unfortunately, as far as FamilySearch Standards go, York, England is even more ambiguous than Adrian describes.

You might remember that several months FamilySearch did run a routine to add a standard value, that is to get rid of red exclamation marks, without changing any displayed value. But they did this only when the display place name was totally unambiguous.

If you go into the Places database, which is the source for all the standards, and type in York, England there are six entries: A town, a borough, a civil registration district, a Poor Law Union, and as a county in two different time periods. I'm sure that due to this, the automatic routine skipped all of the places you are dealing with.

As far as acceptable names for the county of York, the list is huge. The Places database shows fifty two names, any one of which you can use as the displayed place name and properly link it to the standardized version. All fifty two are linked to the same latitude and longitude and so will show the same place on the map.

This is why you get the same list of standards whether you type in Hutton Magna, York, England or Hutton Magna, Yorkshire, England or Hutton Magna, Count of York, England. What displays as the place name in the standarized version of the place name is determined by which of the 52 names is set as what is called the Display Name in the Places database for the language you have set FamilySearch to.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: It seems to me that the origin of Paul's problem is that the Historical Records have names like "Whitby, York, England". Now, written in plain English, that's nonsense. No native would ever use the word "York" to mean "Yorkshire". They might write "Whitby, Yorks, England" at its shortest, but never just "York" on its own, because of the ambiguity.

If FS can go through altering the standardized place names of profiles, does anyone know if it is possible for them to automatically reindex the Historical Records in a similar fashion? To convert "Whitby, York, England" to "Whitby, Yorkshire, England" and all the other places to their correct standards?

I have no idea what that might do to attached sources and the risk of getting an automatic run wrong seems horrific. This might, therefore, be an incredibly stupid suggestion. But the truth is that the issues appear to arise from those badly chosen index names.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Minor point
- Ada Cadman and Ada Douglas were, in reality, utterly different people - I'm just using Ada to investigate (yep, first on the list!)

Not so minor point
- A place-name on the 1891 census of "Ruswarp, Yorkshire, Yorkshire (North Riding), England" is wholly illogical. Not only is it not standardised, it breaks the rule of jurisdictions getting consistently bigger (or smaller) as it goes "small, big, medium, very big" in size of jurisdictions.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Gordon and Adrian

Thank you for your comments. In terms of the worldwide usage of Family Tree, I appreciate this is an inconvenience to relatively few users - generally, those who have Yorkshire ancestry!

However, as I move to researching more distant relatives, who have Yorkshire sources attached, it is frustrating to be constantly standardising these place names - necessary due to the incorrect format previously adopted by GSU / FamilySearch.

I do appreciate my proposed action (by FamilySearch) would entail a piece of programming that would need to be applied not just to the county itself, but the individual parishes, too. On the other hand, it would "just" involve either (1) replacing "York, England" with "Yorkshire, England" in all sources or (2) for the "system" to standardise any names with the former format to the latter. Not having any experience in computer programming, I have no idea of the feasibility of any action that MIGHT be possible in addressing this problem.

One point that should not be a factor here is the fact of there being a CITY of York. The older sources always have "York, York, England" as the place name (possibly prefixed with the actual parish within the city) and the newer ones will have been indexed as "York, Yorkshire, England" (properly, with a "United Kingdom" suffix, if post 1801). In other words, older sources applicable to the CITY of York should never be found in the format "York, England" - they will always have the additional "York" as the COUNTY name.

True, for most users, this must seem a lot of fuss over a relatively trivial matter. However, in terms of sources, there must be hundreds of thousands of them that are carrying a name needing to be standardised - not due to user error, but an incorrect / now unrecognised format, previously adopted by GSU / FamilySearch.

Incidentally, in the 1980/90s (and possibly later) "York" was stated as the name of the county not only in the sources but in the Catalog, too. (i.e. material for the whole county, including individual parishes, was listed under the heading "York", instead of the correct "Yorkshire".)

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: OK - if "Ruswarp, North Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom" is genuinely "on" the Historical source Record - that is a standardised place-name. It happens not to be correctly standardised because it's a post-1974 name for an 1891 event. But it points to the place (not place-name) record for Ruswarp.

So if "Ruswarp, North Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom" is genuinely "on" the Historical source Record that takes the system to the "Ruswarp" place, and from then the system can find the correctly dated place-name of "Ruswarp, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom" and put that into the Standardised Event Place. So maybe it's possible to automatically find the correct standardised place-name??? At least in this case...

Problem solved!!?? Apart from the minor detail of writing the code... And one wonders if FS are actually halfway there - hence the weird variance in the place-name?

LegacyUser

Paul said: Thanks for the further comments / screenshots, Adrian. They do a good job in illustrating the problems with standardising names for individual places / parishes, as well as the "county" itself. I say "county" because, as you say, it was previously split into the three "Ridings". Some websites allow for specific searches for parishes within each, but not FamilySearch.

However, it does use formats like ""Ruswarp, Yorkshire, Yorkshire (North Riding), England" (as you illustrate). The problem arising here is if you copy/paste this into the Residence Place field (say when making a search for a census record) you get the below, as parentheses / brackets are invalid characters!



As you say, it is just that "minor detail" of writing the appropriate code that might stand in the way of my (main) problem being sorted!

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: My Issue 1 above - the presence of 2 place names where I thought that there was only one - cannot possibly be something applicable to Yorkshire only. The multiplicity of names for Yorkshire and its Ridings may, however, cause it to be more visible there. So I'm uncertain about who might be affected.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Brackets are invalid! Oh dear. Left hand of standardisation not knowing what the right hand of indexing had previously done??

LegacyUser

Paul said: Yes, I'm sure there are many other places that cause similar problems for users - but, for me, Yorkshire seems to be particularly problematic when it comes to genealogical research. Even standardising on the correct place name is difficult: there being two Normanby locations, a couple of "Danbys" and a few "Carltons". In the case of Danby parish, this is aka Danby in Cleveland, Danby with Castleton, but - more correctly - plain Danby. The other terms are usually used to differentiate between Danby Wiske and another hamlet, named Danby, some miles west of the parish.

This causes particular problems with the timeline feature. The "Danby, Yorkshire, England" for my ancestor's 1835 christening is marked as a totally different location to the "Danby, Yorkshire, England" that is shown for his residence in the 1841 census. (See https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per... and click of the different pinpoints to illustrate the problem.)

LegacyUser

Juli said: Most indexes on FS use the name of the place at the time of the indexing project. This explains the search result display of the post-1974 placename. It doesn't explain the weird parenthetical version in Source Linker, though. I think various attempts at fixing the metadata have resulted in multiple "place" fields for each index entry, and the two screens are pulling from different fields.