Rationalisation of Place Types
Previous threads here(?) have noted that the categories for Place Type on the "Suggest a New Place" facility don't cover "obvious" needs. The example that springs to mind is "parish" (in the sense of a jurisdiction for a religious establishment) - this isn't in the list of available Place Types that can be chosen. Note that "parish" is not the same as "Place of worship", which is a physical building, not a jurisdiction.
"Parish" is important for recording information from parish registers, which are the prime source for vital events in England & Wales before 1837. It's not immediately available as a Place Type and any attempt to create a parish needs to go through extra requests to the Places Team to get the type adjusted to the correct value.
Conversely, we have "Neighbourhood", "Hamlet", "Village", "Town" and "City", all of which describe clusters of houses and other buildings. Do we really need 5 Place Types to cover larger and larger versions of the same concept?
I understand that the difference between (say) Town and City has implications for Local Government - but are these implications relevant to genealogy? I suggest that they are not relevant because there are places where the Standard Place data is simply wrong, with no known ill-effect. Take, for instance, "Salford, Lancashire, England". This is dated in 3 variants names from 800 to the present day. Salford is described as a "City" from the beginning (i.e. from 800). In fact, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salford it didn't gain city status until 1926. But despite this Place Type being simply wrong for much of Salford's existence, people manage to use the data quite happily. In other words, the distinction between Town and City doesn't matter to them.
- I, therefore, propose that "Hamlet", "Village", "Town" and "City" are all merged into one Place Type - called "Settlement" maybe?
- I am undecided, despite what I wrote above, about merging "Neighbourhood" into the new (presumably) "Settlement" Place Type - if a "Neighbourhood" is always regarded as being a part of a larger settlement, then it may make sense to keep "Neighbourhood".
- If the four are merged into one, then that gives the ability to put 3 new types in the 16 choices for Select a Category on Suggest a New Place. I propose that one of the three new types be "Parish". Suggestions welcome for the others...
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I think it's a good idea to combine all of the various populated place types.
I have often wondered what the difference is between a hamlet and a village, or between a town and a city. I think my puzzlement is rooted in language: in Hungarian (the language applicable to all of my genealogy work), jurisdictions are either a község "community/municipality" or a város "town/city". There are other words available with various nuances of implied size or organization, such as kisközség "small community" and falu "village", but there is no other word for "town" or "city": város is either of those. (It's literally "with fort".)
Having separate categories available for község versus város is logically pleasing, and seems pretty simple: there are only two of them, right? But then you try to come up with English translations, and you start to see the problem: languages never map to each other perfectly. Never. So then you try to quantify the practical consequences for genealogy for whether a jurisdiction was classified as one or the other, and you realize: there are none. What matters for genealogy is "where was the church?" and "where was the registry office?", and beyond the greater likelihood of a larger place having those locally than a smaller one, neither one is at all dependent on the place's classification.
However, I'm not sure that it makes any sense to then turn around and use the space you've freed up for a different sort of classification. What's so special about a parish that it needs to be separate, but, say, "town" doesn't? I think the desire for the category is rooted in a desire to use the places database in a way that it's perhaps not quite suited to: it is not quite a gazetteer. It isn't designed to answer questions like "where was the church?" and "where was the registry office?"; it's meant to answer, first and foremost, "where was this event?". Even when a recording location (such as a parish or registry district) serves multiple places, perhaps from different counties or other higher jurisdictions, the church or office itself is a singular point on the map, and that's what the database will contain. For purposes of recording where two people got married, does it really matter whether that place is categorized as a parish, village, populated place, or building?
As you can probably tell, my thoughts on the addition of "parish" are nebulous at best. I'm willing to be convinced either way. But I do like the idea of simplifying the database by getting rid of my "what's the difference?" questions.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi said
" ... you start to see the problem: languages never map to each other perfectly ... "
Exactly - which, as an aside, is why on my desktop PC I refer to the "xxx Kreis" in German and don't translate. But also, terminology in the same language seldom maps perfectly between administrations - witness the difference in the implied meaning of "city" when asking a Brit and an American. To those of us on the eastern side of the Atlantic, a city is (curiosities apart) big.
As for the inclusion of "parish"... I thought this through and realised that UK genealogy has numerous instances where "parish" and "church" have quite different meanings.
For instance, Army documents of a certain age have the question "In or Near what Parish or Town were you born?" If you answered "In the parish of Barthomley" that certainly didn't mean that you were born in or near Barthomley parish church. It simply meant that you were born somewhere in the ecclesiastical area assigned to Barthomley parish church (i.e. within the parish) and you might have been born in one of 5 different villages (only one of which was called Barthomley) or in the farmlands between.
There are other instances where place of birth is recorded as a parish - the 1851 census is particularly prone to this and if it does refer to a parish, then you can't be any more specific than that.
Further, not all vital events happen in the church. In Church of England practice, private baptisms (originally carried out when either the mother or newborn was seriously ill) took place in the relevant house, not the church. In such a case, the baptism can only be located to the priest's parish - it didn't take place in the church and there might be no clue about which of several villages was the location.
Indeed, in Scotland, for much of genealogical history, neither baptisms nor marriages took place in a church, so again, quite often, we can say no more than that the baptism or marriage took place in a certain parish (containing a number of settlements).
Incidentally - yes, I know that the term "parish" means something different in Louisiana!
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Hamlet, village, town and city ?
Whether a place in the UK is officially a town or a city is confusing and rather arbitrary (boggle your mind with this List of cities in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia) and I don't believe that this particular town/city distinction has any genealogical relevance whatsoever. In the US is there any genealogical relevance to whether a place is a town or city ? Other parts of the anglophone world ? Other languages (Hungarian and German already mentioned) ?
A distinction between rural (hamlet/village) and urban (town/city) settlements may well be meaningful for genealogical purposes, but what's the (genealogically relevant) difference between a village and a hamlet, or the relevant mother tongue equivalents ? Perhaps in medieval times.
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I hope this link clarfies some of the reason for the various place types:
Purpose of place types:
Guideline: Place types are used to categorize places. They should make it possible to easily recognize places of the same general type, regardless of minor linguistic and cultural differences. We seek to strike a balance between granular type descriptions and overly generic classifications.
Explanation: Effectively describing place types for all places makes it much easier to recognize potential duplicate entries, to filter searches and have confidence in their results, and to recognize gaps in the data.
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