What is the proper procedure - standard best practice.

Your image didn't make it onto your post, just a couple of blue squares. That happens sometimes if you edit a post after originally posting it. Sometimes the images show up in a couple of days. Your options are to try reposting them or to post the ID so people can look at the profile directly.

Since you are talking about pre- and post- 1919 Amts I assume you are talking about Denmark or Norway.

I've worked a lot in Norway so I'll give a couple of vague opinions and suggestions based on there.

A. I would leave the index alone. FamilySearch indexes generally use just the post-1919 names. The Norwegian Archives does the same. Editing the index will give a couple of entries that don't match the rest of a set and that could goof up the search results.

B. Generally the advice is to have places names on a FamilySearch profile be the historically accurate name at the time of the event. However, there are some typical exceptions. I hardly ever run across any users on Family Tree and other sites that switch from, for example, Søndre Bergenhus to Hordaland, on January 1, 1919.

C. The Places database, in order to not get way too overwhelming, often picks one name to use for larger areas for which names have changed but the boundaries did not. For the country of Norway, they just use Norway to keep a single top level name. They do not triple the size of the database by having everywhere in the country have an entry for Norway until 1660, The Kingdom of Denmark and Norway from 1660 to 1814, then Norway again from 1815 on.

D. They do change upper level names if there are major boundary changes. So there is Hordaland until 2019, even though it was not called Hordaland until 1919, but then Vestland in 2020 since merging with Sogn og Fjordane more than doubled the area of the county.

E. The Places database assigns an ID to each particular place in the world that has been entered in the database. When we enter a place name on a profile, it is that ID that is used to compare place names. Index place names have also been keyed to those ID numbers. That was a major project a few years ago which unfortunately did not always go well but let's assume that in your case that is not an issue.

When I enter a place name such as Mehammer, Stord, Hordaland, Norway, all the computer actually sees and uses is 10912424, 551080, 5929, 40. When the computer does a search for additional records, it uses 551080 because the indexes do not go down to the farm level, just the community level. All indexed records for Stord until 2020 should be keyed to that Place ID. This is why it is important to make sure that entered places names are linked to the correct standard place.

The place name you enter and the linked standard do not have to look identical because the Names section in the Places database allows for a wide variety of historical names and spellings for a place to be linked to the proper standard. That is why you can enter the farm of Haavig with that spelling if every record you have found for your relatives spells it that way even though the standard has the modern spelling of Håvik.

F. All that is why you can enter a place name as historically correct and it should not affect the search engine at all.

G. Regarding the Data Quality Score you have to keep in mind that the routine is checking the quality of the data in both the Family Tree profile and in the associated FamilySearch database. You may be running into a situation where an appropriate name variant is missing from the Places database. The solution is not to degrade the profile by changing the profile to what the database says but rather to get the database fixed so there is no longer a conflict between your entry and the Places database. To see if that is the issue, I'll need to see your specific example.

Pasting copies of the images here, in case that helps.

One nice feature of the Places database is that it can contain useful historical information about a place. Here is the set of entries for the city of Arendal: https://www.familysearch.org/en/research/places/?focusedId=12349303

Here is some basic history:

The town of Arendal was founded sometime in the 1500s

In 1838 when parishes were all converted in to civil municipalities, large cities could not be contained inside a municipality. A few years later there were some adjustments to this law however Arendal must have been pretty good sized because it remained an independent city not contained in any municipality.

In 1992, the city of Arendal and the municipalities of Hisøy, Moland, Tromøy, and Øyestad were all merged into a single municipality called, and this is where things can get confusing, Arendal. As of 1992, the city of Arendal went from being an independent city to being a city within a municipality of the same name.

Here is the current city of Arendal:

Here is the current municipality of Arendal:

What the Data Quality Score is currently complaining about when it says:

• The standard "Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway" (ID: 2241489) is used for 1992 to 2019. This conflicts with the christening date of 29 September 1901.

is that you (potentially the source linker did this for you without you noticing) have standardized the place name of Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway to be Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway (ID: 2241489) the municipality which did not exist until 1992. Instead it needs to be linked to the standard Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway (ID: 12349305) which is the town.

You can see the difference when entering or editing place names:

I'm not sure if the data quality score will still complain if you use Aust-Agder for pre-1919 events. It shouldn't since Aust-Agder and Nedenes are listed as alternate names for each other.

Also, the process of combining place name entries so that there is just one entry for the pre-1919 Amt designtion and the 1919 change to Fylker instead of two is ongoing. If you choose to use Arendal, Nedenes, Norway, as a small percentage of users do, at some point in the future the standard will change to Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway but your entry will still stay the way you entered it.

If you choose to use Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway for his 1901 birth and the Data Quality Checker still complains, you can just dismiss the flag with an explanation of why you are using Aust-Agder. But do correct the standardization to be a version of the town. Not doing so could throw off the search routine.

One of the things I like about the Data Quality Checker is it ability to pick out very subtle data errors like this place standardization error that are basically impossible to see just looking at a profile.

One issue I see here, is too much emphasis on ENGLISH-centric place names.

Non-English genealogists don't like the idea of English-centric being forced on them.

(By the way Norge is correct native-centric name and part of my direct ancestry so I enter them as Norge, not Norway, like wise I do with other countries Deutschland, not Germany; Polen, not Poland; Magyarország not Hungary; Österreich, not Austria; România, , not Romania, Danmark, not Denmark; Schweiz, not Switzerland; Italia, not Italy; Espana, not Spain; Brasil, not Brazil)

How do you think I was able to contact my cousins over in Europe in first place and able to get them to contribute to the TREE in first place? (My ancestry is very wide spread not only in Europe but also in South America, especially Brasil, Argentina and Chile where some of my Deutsch descendant cousins are.

Yes, you can force the Tree to accept specific spellings with ease.

@Gordon Collett said:

"… you (potentially the source linker did this for you without you noticing) have standardized the place name of Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway to be Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway (ID: 2241489) the municipality which did not exist until 1992. Instead it needs to be linked to the standard Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway (ID: 12349305) which is the town.

"You can see the difference when entering or editing place names …"

Just as a comment, the warning is that if you only look at the person's profile and see "Arendal, Aust-Agder, Norway", you have no means (unless I'm mistaken, which is perfectly possible) of telling whether this is the municipality or the town of the same name. The type (municipality, town, etc) is only visible in the drop down list when updating the profile and by that point I don't think that you know what came before. It's for this reason that I always prefer to insert text like "municipality" in the display name while still standardising on the official form of the name. Sadly, in only some cases do we see a type visible in the standard placename - e.g "New York City" is actually standardised as that, contradicting those who claim that the official name of NYC is simply "New York" (I have no idea what the legal name actually is but that was the claim for ages).

Perhaps off-topic, but I recently saw a Virginia county listed as "Fairfax County" in the FS place name database. I was shocked. The other Virginia counties I checked do not have the word "county" appended.

As a NYC researcher, it drives me a little nuts that the standard on FS, for New York City before 1898 (the year of consolidation), is "New York City, New York County, New York, United States."

https://community.familysearch.org/en/profile/%C3%81ine.n%C3%AD.Donnghaile

What so shocking about Fairfax County, Virginia? The problem is there is city of Fairfax, an independent city and the county has separate government despite the City of Fairfax being the seat of this same county.

Fairfax County isn't the only one with this concept, other countries in Virginia are like that.

@W D Samuelsen contact me please
There are many, many, many counties that have the same names as cities/towns, and those do NOT have County appended.