Restore the word County in US locations
It is not Mahoning, it's Mahoning County. Leaving the word county out can cause confusion.
For istance, Someone enters Erie, Pennsylvania. Do they mean Erie or Erie County.
PLUS, all the major genealogy softwares are standardized using the word county.
So, when the user uses their interface to your website it's a mismatch on locations.
IE: Joe Smith lived in Erie, Erie County, Pennsylvania
Thus when it transfers to your system, the word county can throw off an accurate search.
Requiring the user to go into your screen and eliminate the word county, every time.
The word County, needs to be restored in standardized place names. PERIOD!!!!!
Comments
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Technically, the inclusion of the word "county" is typically not in the Incorporation filings as part of the name but as part of the description. And the usage has varied in word order & capitalization as writing norms change: County of Erie, Erie County, Erie county. Excessive capitalization seems to been a recent (within the last 50 years) mangling of conventions regarding the formatting of proper names.
As for my own database, I'll use Erie county, Erie city (Erie is a 3rd class city as define by the Commonwealth).
And I do the same with boroughs & townships.
Unfortunately, to disambiguate in this same database that is fully hierarchical, I've had to fallback to tagging ubiquitous names in an ugly manner. (i.e., there are 30 counties & 1 parishes honoring Washington. So that becomes "Washington (PA) county" since selecting interfaces often only display 1 level of the hierarchy.)
So to arbitrarily choose one bastardization over another is not supportable. This is the sort of thing that should be done in personal preferences... so that the data may remain true to the original formulations.
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