Should birth places in united states prior to 1776 be standardized to United States or to British Co
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Good question @John Patwell I would think that they should be for British Colonial America. Anyone else have thoughts on this? @FamilySearch Places @FamilySearch Family Tree @FamilySearch Tips and Tricks
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If you asked somebody living on the North American continent in 1773 where they lived, they could not say "the United States" because the US (even as a name) did not exist! Furthermore, if they lived in what we now know as California, that would also NOT be British Colonial America (it was mainly Spanish)
"Standard" place names taken from the places database are only used to identify geographical locations. They ALL have geographical coordinates. A piece of land can change names over time. That is why there are different names associated with a given coordinate there. This is not just to handle aliases, but to define what the name is in a given time frame.
So technically, you should use the name at the time of the event. But this is not a hard and fast rule. Frequently you see burial events recorded with the present-day name and location of the cemetery. Cemeteries do change names depending on which church or person's property it is on, but the standard places database may not have all of the time-specific names or aliases for the cemetery in it. In this case, the more important issue is to have a name for the correct geographical coordinates used when standardizing the display name that you enter into the person's record.
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Thank you for expounding on the subject @JeffWiseman JeffWiseman I appreciate your insight!
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Glad to help when I can :-)
In my limited experience, you can normally always use the correct name at the time an event occurred. If it is not in the standard places database, the FamilySearch Places group can add it.
The only real exception to this that I ever come across is for Burial locations. People seem to prefer to use the "current" name of a cemetery. This enables people to find it today ('course that won't help 60 years from now when the name has changed again :-) In other words, they replace the name of where their ancestor WAS buried (i.e., the event location) with the name of where their ancestor IS buried (even though it is the same physical location).
This is technically wrong since the Burial vital is the record of an EVENT--i.e., time, and a place at that time. But since the name is representing the same exact geolocation as the original name was identified with, they are interchangeable for geolocation purposes.
When this occurs, I will typically add a note titled "BURIAL" that indicates the different names the cemetery was known as.
This can get even tricker if the cemetery were MOVED into an adjacent county, but kept the same name. If an ancestor were buried in the original location before it was moved, now you have a different geographical location with the same cemetery name, so you would have to identify the whole standard place name (including the cemetery name) with the different geolocation. Find a grave would typically only show the new location. A death certificate would show the location of the REAL burial event. So what should you use? The place where the ancestor WAS buried is NOT the place where they currently ARE buried!
And one last thing that puts a spin on Cemetery locations. Frequently the "location" given for a cemetery, is NOT the location of the cemetery! This happens in Find A Grave a lot. The cemetery is listed as being in a particular town in a given county--but that information was/is frequently used for administration and mail purposes. Even though find a grave puts the cemetery in a given town (implying the county that town is in), the fact may be that it is NOT "in town" but just a ways out and perhaps in a different county or township than the town it is associated with. I have found that the geolocation based on a cemetery's name shown in Find a Grave can in fact be 10-20 miles away from where the cemetery itself actually is!
You generally don't run into issues like these nearly as much with the locations for other vitals. But stating that someone was born in 1850 in Monroe county, West Virginia is still just plain wrong regardless of what so many sources that are written after the fact say. In 1850, Monroe county was in Virginia. In 1880, it was in West Virginia. A "Standard" place name is only meaningful within a given time period.
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Thank you. That makes sense. I've read more and have a better understanding about standard and standardizing names. I will follow your suggestion in any new people I create records for. Name of place that was correct for the historical time period, and being sure it's standardized with correct geographical coordinates. One other related question - is it good practice to 'correct' existing records to show British Colonial America for events in Virginia in early 1700's, or should I leave them as being in United States?
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I would change them to show the correct area designation at that time. When making the changes, I would add something like the following in the (rather schizophrenic) "Reason for the change" or "Reason the information is correct" box:
"The United States did not exist at this time. Location was changed to correct this error"
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@FamilySearch Places Could you help with this question?
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From a personal point, I'd say that the answer to the original question of "United States or ... British Colonial America" should be - neither! (Don't take the rest of this answer too seriously - but if it makes you think, that's good).
I don't have any pre-1776 people in my lot, so the question doesn't arise for me but I do have people in what is now Australia prior to 1901 (when the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia) and for them, in my personal data at home, I just terminate the place-name with the colony name (e.g. New South Wales, Queensland, etc.) and I omit the "Australia". That's because there was no single jurisdiction for Australia.
So if I did have some people in pre-1776 North America, I'd just terminate the place-name with "Virginia" (say), because BCA did not exist as a jurisdiction. That is just my personal view, given rather tongue-in-cheek, and there's no way I'd advocate people changing their data in FSFT. Not when we're all so far down the road of BCA, etc. Still, I do wonder quite why FS created BCA out of nowhere...
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The jurisdiction approach is a good start but it does not cover all situations. The "Atlantic Ocean" is a standard place, but it is not a jurisdiction. So where did FS get the name? In history there are a lot of "Places" that were groups of people/cultures that had a common name even though it was not a jurisdiction.
And that is ok, as long as when you use (or don't use) a non-jurisdiction type name, that the proper geographical name from the standards database is coupled to it. The fact that a name in the standards database is not exactly "right" in the eyes of different people at the time doesn't really matter so much. It is only there to provide a unique name to some geographical coordinates, in a way that is understandable. Places that didn't have a jurisdiction such as "America" still had a well known name.
Adrian, I'm curious about this though. What was the continent of Australia referred to as prior to 1901? What did they all that big "island" back then?
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Regarding "United Kingdom." My friends in England say that using United Kingdom for any places in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, is like using North America for Canada, the USA, and more. It doesn't make sense, and it really looks terrible on the FS Fan chart when countries are chosen as the display.
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Jeff - I think it was only in the last couple of days that I realised that "Atlantic Ocean", "North Sea", etc, were indeed standard places in FS. So yes, they appear to have (sensibly) disregarded the "must be a jurisdiction" viewpoint.
Re Australia - according to Wikipedia "In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially by that name". So, yes, the word was understood - although perhaps not always with identical significance to now - apparently New Zealand was originally administered as part of New South Wales, i.e. part of "Australia". But don't mention that to the Kiwis! :-)
I guess that (at home) I use the colony name without "Australia" partly as a simple way of highlighting the political change in 1901 - similarly, finding myself with one lady who was born in late 19th century Finland and died there in the mid-20th century, I recorded her place of birth as "Grand Duchy of Finland" and her death as "Finland" just to allude to the transition from rule by the Russian Tsar.
It's probably important to reiterate that what I can do at home to satisfy my own desires doesn't necessarily match what is sensible to expect worldwide users of FSFT to do. Though I would like them to at least think about these things....
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Hmm. Sitting very much in England, I would agree with part of that.
The United Kingdom is a state (except that word's a minefield - I mean "state" as in "sovereign state", not "state" as in "United States"!!), so it's not like "North America", which is just a geographical term. But conversely we've always regarded England, Wales and Scotland as countries in their own right and that's what we'd want to see on that Fan Chart.
And talking of a terrible Fan Chart - you just motivated me to check mine - it's a sea of blue for United Kingdom, apart from a couple of red boxes in the middle of the blue where I have (inappropriately) standardised places as England, it appears.
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adrianbruce1, those are reasons that I might do the same thing as you sometimes--in the DISPLAY name. It doesn't matter what the standard places name that you couple with it says as the Display name is the main one that is actually seen and the standard name is what gives it its coordinates. The standard places name taken from the standards database will likely have some name that was "globally recognized" at the time whether it was jurisdictional or not.
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Good point Jeff. I knew that I could add bits so that "Grand Duchy of Finland" could indeed be the Display version of the Standard name of Finland. I hadn't considered (because I think I hadn't had occasion) lopping bits off - but yes, in Beta I just discovered that I can have a Display name of "Somewhere, Melbourne, Victoria" matching a Standard name of "Melbourne, Victoria, Australia". (I do these things one bit at a time for anyone reading).
So you made me think and experiment Jeff, thank you!
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Yea, the one thing that I would advise you to be careful of, is when you use a Display name where the system brings up something totally different as the first choice, I worry about someone going in and accidentally "touching" the display name causing an automatic re-assignment of the standard name to some else inappropriate. I've not played with it much, but I don't really trust the automatic assignment of standard names as it currently functions. I think that after you go to the trouble of walking way down the list of suggested standards and picking one, it just seems too easy for someone to accidentally replace it with the suggestion at the top of the list.
So I pick and choose so that the automatic assignment works better. For example, having a standard of Chillicothe, Ross, Ohio, United States will automatically come up as first choice for 123 Columbus Road, Chillicothe, Ohio. But if you leave out the street number, it can mistake the road name for a town (in this case Columbus) and assume your town is a county.
The system seems to be sensitive to numbers in the first part of a location which is great for addresses. But the indexing in source census records can reverse the positions of towns and townships. So I try to massage my "Display name" so that the automatic standard assignment can more easily match it. That's why I like to frequently take a standard name and just prefix it with the extra detail. But if there is no number in the first part of the location, it can misbehave sometimes
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I personally think that keeping them in the United States as it is today is fine. You can add an alternate birth place with it in British Colonial America or vice versa if you wish. I think that having it in the United States is a great visual when it comes to where your family members were born, just because it would be easier to look up on a map if you ever wanted to visit. Just my thoughts.
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Well, that sort of depends. Boundaries move around over time. I have ancestors that on some current historic records are shown as being born in West Virginia in 1860. That's impossible because West Virginia didn't even exist before the civil war. And what about my ancestors that were buried in Monroe county, Virginia around that time frame? If you were to try and find any headstones in Monroe, Virginia today, you would be over 150 miles away in the wrong place. They are actually in Monroe County, WEST Virginia today. Monroe, Virginia may not have even existed then.
To identify the exact physical location where something happened, you can't rely on a simple name to have any accuracy if it is not accompanied with a timeframe. That why FS has the dual name system. All standard places in the standards database have multiple names and specific timeframes when they were known by those names along with the geo-coordinates of the physical location.
When you attach a standard place location name to your Display name, you have basically documented ALL the names it used to be over time, and what it was at different times. If you have a record of someone being buried in the XYZ Cemetery in 1840, you would not be able to find them today since Cemeterys can change names occasionally, and township, county, and even State borders can move back and forth across the same Cemetery. I've also seen where counties are created, exist for 5 or 6 years, and then are disolved back into other counties only to reappear in a slightly different place 10 years later!
Here's fun (and useful) site that is great for illustrating this. Go to this location and pick a state from the list (try starting with Virginia). Go down to the "Play" button and click on it then just watch as Virginia evolved from 1617 to 1995.
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The FamilySearch help article* provides no clarity for your exact question, so I searched blogs and videos and found this to be the most consistent answer, “British Colonial America” for the 13 original colonies and their westward expansion pre-United States. Few dealt with it, but the same should hold true for all the other Colonial Americas covering westward expansion, such as Indian Territories, Mexican Colonial America, French Colonial America and so on. There may be an article that directs to use British Colonial America, but I haven’t found it yet.
In my husband’s line, I see “British Colony” and it shows up as standardised place. I see “British Colonial America” and it shows as standardised place. My personal opinion is choose which way you want it to read and stick with it.
I suspect this will become more confusing for a while with the new standardisation project. I think it’s much more important to be clear about where to find the records now for your cities, states and counties in the absence of a Genealogical Proof Standard for what to call colonial records. Jeff Wiseman’s recommendation is spot on for that.
* FamilySearch Help Center article “How do I enter dates and places into Family Tree?
Information“Tips for places:
The database of standard places is not yet complete. The standards will improve over time.
If possible, enter the place-name as it existed when the event happened.
You have the option to enter places in your native language or the native language of that place.
If the correct standard is not available, type the place as you want it to be recorded, type a space, and then type a version of the place-name that can be standardized. This may be the modern-day place-name or the name of the county, state, province, or country where it is currently located.
As you type, the system displays the available standards. Click the correct one.
- To select no standard, click the mouse somewhere else on the screen.
- To keep what you typed, click the first item on the standards list. Family Tree selects a standard if it can.”
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Since the boundaries of those early colonies and states frequently shifted and changed for several decades, it seems to me the only truly accurate place to standardize is the one that uses Connecticut British Colonial America, so the patron doesn't go search for records at today's version of Connecticut.
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FYI - Re "Mexican Colonial America, French Colonial America"
The only XXXX Colonial America that I can find in the Standard Place-Names is British Colonial America.
It appears to me from Wikipedia that the French equivalent was New France. This does appear in the Standard Place-Names - one of the lower level entries in NF, for instance, is Louisiana, New France.
As for a Spanish equivalent, it looks like it's New Spain according to Wikipedia - again, that's in the Standard Place-Names. I confess however that the tiny Wikipedia maps and my utter unfamiliarity with Spanish made it difficult for me to be certain what's going on there.
Comparing New France and New Spain to BCA, New Spain was certainly a single entity as Wikipedia refers to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. New France I am less certain about but there is reference in Wikipedia to a Governor of New France, then a Governor General of New France, implying both NS and NF had a single jurisdiction - unlike BCA, where there never was an overall jurisdiction.
If there are any Historical Records for NS and NF, I have no idea!
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