Standardizing Place App
I noticed that 7 of the 10 records I volunteered to help with gave me just two choices: between a Town and a Township. There was insufficient information available for me to make an accurate call, so I skipped them. I suggest that you refine the app to segregate records with this issue and give more specific guidance to your volunteer helpers.
-Cindy
Comments
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Standardizing location names world wide is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. We in the USA do things differently and most speak English but we can't expect them change to our customs much less change their own past history.
Naming locations IS NOT one size fits all. In all my years of research and adding records I have not found any where that they use the "City, County, State, Country" naming convention of the USA-- at least not in Mexico, Spain, Ireland, The Netherlands, Finland or any Latin American country. The county designation does not exist in Mexico but their city limits (municipality) reaches out into rural like our county. Many countries are more rural based or have much smaller units of location like Townlands in Ireland-village belonging to a city, or in which archival church where baptism & marriage were performed. This additional information is valuable to researchers but there is no searchable place for it in FamilySearch.
Examples:
Puebla (city), Puebla (State), Mexico (there are no counties) is not sufficient in research nor in identifying a person when adding their records. Common given names with common surnames are confused and can only be distinguished by more specific living or event location. FamilySearch now uses Puebla, Puebla, Puebla, Mexico as the standardized location. I lived in Puebla for 7 years and I have no idea what that refers to. The official name of the city of Puebla has been Puebla de Zaragoza (but also Puebla de los Angeles). A third level of Puebla in the standardized name is confusing and doesn't fit the blanks in adding names.
Ireland does not use the State designation but uses a much smaller unit than city. ie: my ancestors came from Loughguile (city/village) County Antrim in Northern Ireland, UK. But no State (Ulster) is ever used nor mentioned. The country is UK which is the same as England. Northern Ireland is neither a State nor Country. But the Irish are not a mobile people and are from very specific Townlands (a unit of land of about 200 acres where 10-12 families live and have lived for centuries. This fact alone distinguishes people of same name which is vital for accuracy any further research. Years ago there was only one country of Ireland and now there is the Republic of Ireland, EU and Northern Ireland, UK so what time frame do we use to state the location? My ancestors were not born in Northern Ireland yet today it is.
Summary: "City, County, State, Country" works perfectly well for the USA but is confusing for else where.
I am sure you are well aware of this problem but with the miracles that FamilySearch has pulled off in the past I hope you can fix this one too. A programing idea: when a country is typed in then an applicable dropdown menu appears for adding localized location options with time period options.
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FamilySearch's database of places, which the place-standardization routines use, is constantly being updated and added to, with the sometimes-incompatible goals of accuracy and ease of use. The number of levels and types of jurisdiction are by no means fixed at the USA's sorta-standard of town, county, state, country. (Most countries are not divided into states, after all.)
The database is designed to have different labels for each location depending on the administrative changes that have occurred. I don't offhand know enough about the history to say much about places that are now in Northern Ireland, but for example, "Pozsony, Pozsony, Hungary" is one of the labels for Bratislava. It has a time period of "Unknown - 1918". (I'd argue that the end date should be 1920, but that's a minor quibble.) This enables people to use the name of the place at the time of the event, which is fixed, rather than the current name, which can change.
What to do in the "help fix placenames" app is a complicated topic: for example, the town versus township question would be likely to utterly baffle a Californian, because there's no such thing as a township in California. (And even in places that do have townships, the word can have rather vastly different meanings.) Perhaps what the app needs is an intermediate step: "I can tell this is referring to someplace in Pennsylvania, but I can't figure out anything more specific; please have someone familiar with Pennsylvania take a look at it." This would be one way to work around the chicken-and-egg problem of "I want to work with placenames in Place X, but the whole point of the app is that these are events that the computer hasn't been able to localize, so it doesn't know yet whether it's Place X or not."
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