Standardizing Dates and/or locations
Ref Case #07813639
I understand your response stating there are many variations in the dates and locations currently in Family Tree and the difficulty in Standardizing them, however over the past year I have updated over 73,000 dates and or locations and very few have presented a variation from the "Standard Format" currently in Family Tree. As a past computer programmer in my profession, I believe that a program to update such data would be able to identify and update the majority of dates or locations and therefore be very helpful to the families concerned and I could spend my retirement time doing other Genealogy problems.
Ref Case #07813667
In Family Search when I click on "Contributions" and then on "Private People" in my effort to update a person from Deceased to a date of death, I find it near impossible to scroll the several pages of names to re-locate the person I am working on. Can a Number System be attached to the names of the persons. I understand this sequential number may change as names are added to the list so maybe a number consisting of the "Date-Number" would work.
Thanks for your consideration.
Cameron Shirra
Comments
-
Re "As a past computer programmer in my profession, I believe that a program to update such data would be able to identify and update the majority of dates or locations"
Me too. However, and it's a big however, FamilySearch has been badly burnt by programs doing exactly what we would both wish is possible. Somehow, something went badly wrong, I believe, leading to the Improve Place-Names initiative. We've never found out what went wrong, so I suspect that somewhere, something in the database is not how they (and I) would expect.
0 -
Questions regarding standardization are always confusing until one is sure everyone is understanding the terms used and are using them in the same way. So for clarity, I need to ask a question. Of the 73,000 dates and places you updated, how many of them had red exclamation points next to them?
If they did not have red exclamation points next to them then they were already standardized, using the term as FamilySearch does, and you did not need to update them. In the future, feel free to leave them alone and spend your time doing what you actually want to do.
If they had red exclamation points next to them, then no matter what they looked they were not standardized and needed to be. (It does seem, as Adrian points out, that recently Family Search tried to update standards and instead a bunch of data lost their links to the standard so there are red exclamation points next to dates and places that exactly match the standardized value.
In Family Tree, standardization means being linked to the proper underlying computer representation of the date or place. It has nothing to do with the appearance of the date or place on the Display page. "Mar. 23, 1930," "23 MAR 1930," "Tuesday, March 23, 1930" are all properly standardized when linked to 23 March 1930. All can be entered exactly as they stand here and not have red exclamation points. Some are just more pleasing to look at than others according to today's fashion sense.
0 -
Re: case #07813639:
When you say "I have updated over 73,000 dates and or locations…" I certainly hope that you are not just changing the actual displayed values to match a standard date or location value from the standards database. As Gordon Collett has pointed out, unless there is a data error on them or you have additional details to add, you have no need to be touching them at all. If you do, you may actually be destroying legitimate data that is useful.
A displayed location value of 45 Zander Drive, Chillicothe, Ross, Ohio does not exist with map co-ordinates in the standards database, so it typically would be "standardized" by linking it to the standards database location of Chillicothe, Ross, Ohio, United States. However, the former is far more accurate than the latter so it would be completely wrong to actually change the displayed name from the former to the latter. "Standardizing" is more about assigning geographical coordinates to a location than it is assigning some kind of pre-defined name to it. Names change over time and have many legitimate alternates. Geographic coordinates do not.
Re: case #07813667:
You are quite correct about your list of "Living" persons in your private space. There is absolutely NO rhyme or reason in the order that they are presented in the list and you cannot sort them in any way.
However, there *IS* a Search By Name function for that list that you might try out. It seems to work ok and is fairly fast assuming that you have at least part of a name to start with. E.g. in my contributions entering a value of "robert" will bring up a list including Robert O Hull, Timothy Robert Wiseman, and Lauren Roberts.
1 -
Regarding you second comment. My webpage design skills are exceedingly primitive so I have have no idea what it would take to design a site so that I could be on a page, click on a link to leave that page, then reload the first page and have it scroll down to exactly where I was when I left it.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to do what you want to do. After you have opened your list of private people and found the one you want to edit, right-click on that name to open the person in a new tab (or window, depending on your browser settings), do the edit, then close the tab. Then you can go back to the tab with the list of private people and be right where you were.
1
