Standardized Places in Family Search

LarryAndrew1

I am doing an extensive review of my family line. Very Often, I find a place that the program says is not standardized, but is spelled exactly as the standardized suggestion. Once I edit and select the suggested standardized place, it then accepts the place as standardized. 

Also, when I compare place information on Ancestry and update or send it to FamilySearch, the same thing frequently happens. I have to go back to FamilySearch, edit the field and select the standardized place (which is identical to what was there) before the program recognizes it as a standardized place.

There should be someway for the program to recognize and accept dates that are standardized without excessive editing and updating.

Gordon Collett

In Family Tree, all dates and places are entered twice. Once as the user entered text and once as the standardized version that is linked to the user entered text to tell the program what the user entered text means. This is a very powerful feature that I have not seen on any other website. It allows use to enter more accurate data and not be limited to a list of "standards."

When typing in data directly into Family Tree, the drop down menu of dates and places allows you to both quickly complete the data and link it to the standardized version at the same time. Sometimes the Source Linker is not very good at this and so sometimes when you enter a place name using the Source Linker, no standard gets attached. This has been reported as a bug multiple times through these forums so I assume the programmers are working on that.

When you move data from Ancestry to Family Tree, since Ancestry does not use this dual data entry system, I'm not surprised there is often a problem getting the two data fields in Family Tree properly linked.

When you see an entry where the displayed text looks fine but there is a notice that it is not standardized, that just means that whoever first entered the data was not paying attention and did not complete the process by making sure the standardized version was also properly entered and linked to the displayed version.

The fact that the program does not automatically force a standard but requires us to properly enter and confirm the linked standard is actually an important part of this dual entry system.