Adding "Current Location" below original historic location, and time exclusivity to locations
I specialize in Czech genealogy and before 1918, the country was technically part of Austria. Of course using an Austria birth location for someone born in 1850 is more correct, but if you do there are a lot of complications. Many of the districts have since changed and many Czech village names are instead recorded in German (because Austria administrated under the German language). This is alright... but nowadays, most church and census records for the country are organized under their current names and districts. So if, for example, someone was born in "Neudorf" in the former Caslav district, a researcher would have to scramble to figure out which regional archive to use, what "Neudorf" translates to in Czech, and what new specific district the village is now under (as more districts exist today than back then as well).
What I propose is when you see a person's historic birth location in their profile, you could see a "current location:" right below which can specify where it is today. On top of that, if I hypothetically make a profile, saying someone was "born 1803" and then saying they were "born in Prague", it would be great if the input would automatically only take the "Austria" option, instead of offering "Czechia" or "Czechoslovakia". Those can instead be seen once the profile is made and therefore both answers can be understood.
This is my first UI suggestion but thank you for reading.
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Locations are not established or tracked by name, but by a geophysical coordinate system. If you take a standardized name and open it in https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/, then go down to the Basic Information, the place is designated by Longitude and latitude coordinates. Below that are various names that the location has been known as. Note that there may be no current name for those same coordinates on today's maps.
I suspect that at some date, this information can be provided from within a person's record, but for now, it is found in the place research area of the site.
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As Tom has pointed out, a "Standard" location from the standards database (and viewable via the places tool) is a geophysical location. That geophysical location never changes. However, it's name can based on many different reasons, not the least of which is country, state, province, or town, etc. boundaries moving around.
When you assign a standard name to a place field, that name automatically comes with a time period that it was legitimate already recorded in the standards database (note that some standard names have not all been assigned time periods).
This helps when dealing with situations where the burial event was at a certain time in a particular cemetery. Years later that cemetery name changed. In the standards database, both those names and the appropriate time periods are assigned to the same identical geophysical coordinates.
So the information is already there. What is being requested here is to somehow make it visible all the time on the main details page in FS. That could be useful but probably pretty tricky to implement.
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An ideal complete FS Places database would have a timeline of a certain town, have alternate names, its hierarchy, etc. So you would just have to go to familysearch.org/research/places/ and search up the specific place to find that info.
Of course, the database will continually be updated throughout time, so it is not complete.
Lately I've been helping update the Dutch standard places. You can help as you go through your research, too. You can do it via 3 main ways. Via familysearch.org/research/places/ , Group: FamilySearch Places , or, my favorite, via email (placefeedback@familysearch.org).
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