Using "of" in front ot a place name
Originally this was used when the place of birth was unknown. The genealogist would then use "of" preceeding the most likely place of birth resulting from scrunity of the sources for that individual. The "of" may be used at the village, town, county or country level.
As a volunteer I am not comfortable with standardizing when it means the loss of "of".
Answers
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We've never included the word "of" in indexing. We just use the place name given on the document.
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When you standardize the place name on the Person ID details, you can write a reason in the box provided. You can simply write "born in rural location near Smithville" in the Reason box and the standardized name in the residence or birthplace, etc box. This will satisfy your desire to be as accurate as possible with the information you have.
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When you standardize the place name on the Person ID details, you can enter "of" before the rest of the standardized place name and it will be accepted. For example, of, Phoenix, Maricopa, Arizona, United States.
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What (if anything) is the effect of including 'of' on the ability to locate the profile when searching on the place name, mapping relatives, etc.? Does DQS take this into account in any way? And how do the 3rd party applications honour this when syncing places?
Also, I had not seen this usage previously (to me 'of' would have read as 'definitely of' until I read this thread, so thank you) so I am just wondering whether other non-experts would misinterpret it too and whether the user interface might beneficially clarify this 'best guess' meaning, where 'of' is present on a standardised place. (I would have thought this concept would better be represented by a separate 'level of confidence' value on the standardised place, but that's the data geek in me talking.)
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As @dlmelville indicates, you can have "of" in front of the Display Placename and standardise on the Placename without the "of". So the "of" isn't lost. For instance, one can have a birth displayed as "Of Cheshire, England" but standardised as "Cheshire, England". Any searches, hints etc would work on the standardised version, ie "of" is meaningless for those purposes.
Since every Placename on a profile has been standardised (where possible) for years, then "of" lost much of its significance years ago. It became just a hint.
Since the word "of" doesn't mean anything if you don't have that long term knowledge, I would be happy to see its disappearance, so long as alternative mechanisms were used to convey the uncertainty. I might enter a birthplace as "Probably Nantwich, Cheshire, England" and standardise it to "Nantwich, Cheshire, England". Personally I'd leave it blank if I didn't know it, but there are those who insist on entering baptism details into the birth details and rather than get into an edit war, I just use the approximation by entering "Probably..." in the front of the Display Placename. I have even capitulated to stop an edit war by saying "Guessed at Nantwich, Cheshire, England". That seems to satisfy both parties.
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@Carole Haines Stanford Exactly where are you volunteering in FamilySearch? And what type of standardization are you doing? Since you posted under Indexing, are you working in the Verify Places section or directly in Family Tree?
Are you here:
or here:
If you are in Verify Places, linking a standard to the existing place name does not change that existing place name. It only standardizes it. Doing so will not remove the "of" you are concerned about.
If you are in Family Tree, you do not have to, and should never, never, never, remove that "of" unless you are working as a regular user who is going to clean up the entire family. Standardizing must never degrade information by removing pieces of it.
To demonstrate that when I link the standard to the place name:
The place name itself does not change but is now standardized as you can see by the removal of the bright text that was under the place name and removal of the data error flag in Research Help:
You can see the standardization by clicking on the place name to open the Data View pop up:
If you are working as a volunteer directly in Family Tree and have no connection to this family or have no other reason to fully research and fix the entire family, then you should also do no more than this.
To do this is Family Tree, I'll go to one of his children:
Opening the Edit pop up I see that the date is already standardized. It's ugly but is standardized. But the place name is not.
To fix this, I would click in the birthplace field, click on the top line in the dropdown menu to preserve what is there, then click on the suggested standard, and change it to the right one:
If I were family, I would, of course, completely fix both the date and place name.
If you are now realizing that you have not understood what standardization means in Family Tree or are otherwise confused, here is a presentation I put together a couple of years ago. The appearance of the website is a bit outdated (for example they got rid of map pins on the Display tab) but the principles are the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veP6UcEkHaA The first part is about the Places Database which is where the standards come from and second part is about entering place names using FamilySearch's dual place name entry system.
Now to change topics. Regarding that "of." As explained above, it is perfectly fine to leave "of" in front of a place name like this:
The program even tells you that this is standardized correctly.
However, if I am researching this family, I would be concerned that this antiquated, obsolete remnant of old standards that were put in place when paper forms had short lines and few places to put information will confuse the hint engine and make it ignore all possible hints for this person that show him born outside of New York. So I would instead make use of the wonderful capabilities FamilySearch has created in Family Tree and do the following.
First I would remove the birth place because I have no idea where he was born and so that information is very likely incorrect.
Then I would go down to Other Information and expand that Of to what it really means so no one is ever confused by it:
This is what that Of indicates but this is far more clear about the facts, lets other researchers know what is going on, and will not confuse the hint engine.
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Not good idea to explain anything in "Reason Box" at all.
UNHIDE the reasons by putting in the Notes Section where everybody can see. There are many of them who don't know what is hidden in those hidden reason boxes.
You will not believe what I found in those boxes. This include the links to records not listed in sources. I had to move those links to sources.
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