With the new placenames system, there seems to have been a decision to standardize on cemetery names
With the new placenames system, there seems to have been a decision to standardize on cemetery names for hamlets or districts or neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t really make much sense. It is unlikely that anyone was born, married or died in a cemetery. And even as a burial place it can be misleading; many people were buried on the family property, so to force the standard for an area to be a specific cemetery name is technically incorrect.
Here is an example: White Hall, Albemarle, Virginia
This place name is identified in the USGS database--https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/1477940. Its name variants are also referenced at this URL.
A history of the place name is found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Hall,_Albemarle_County,_Virginia
We can see it referenced as a district name on this 1880 census--https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9YBF-3SV?lang=en&i=36&cc=1417683
The problem:
This placename is mapped to the standard place: Mount Moriah Methodist Church Cemetery, Albemarle, Virginia, United States, which is identified as a Village, 1862-present. This is not correct for reasons stated in my second paragraph.
If I really dig around the placenames database, I can find White Hall District, Albemarle, Virginia. But when typing the placename “White Hall” the only relevant matches are White Hall, Albemarle, British Colonial America, which placename did not exist in British Colonial America. You have to type out the whole “White Hall District” before a standardized placename match is found.
I grew up a few miles from White Hall. Although I recognize at some point it was a district, no one ever called it “White Hall District” but just “White Hall.”
What I think should happen:
- The cemetery should not be a standardized placename for White Hall; it should be its own placename.
2. Standardize on either White Hall, Albemarle, Virginia or White Hall District, Albemarle, Virginia, but if the latter make sure that if someone type in “White Hall, Albemarle” you present the White Hall District, because very few people will ever guess that is what they are supposed to type.
3. Remove White Hall, Albemarle, Virginia, British Colonial America, as that was never a valid placename.
4. After correcting the standard placename, go back through the database and fixup all the places where “White Hall, Albemarle, Virginia, United States” or an alternate form “Whitehall, Albemarle, Virginia, United States” was incorrectly mapped to the “Mount Moriah Methodist Church Cemetery, Albemarle, Virginia, United States”
Comentários
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Your question, comments and recommendations here actually cover three independent but interrelated topics. I'll break them down with commentary:
I. Standardizing on Cemetery names.
There was no decision made to standardize on cemetery names. If you search Community for "auto-standardization," even Community's crippled and ineffective search system with bring up dozens of posts regarding this topic.
What actually happened is that a few of years ago an automated routine was run against all the historical record database indexes to match up the indexed place names with entries in the Places database and replace the indexed name with the corresponding standardized version in the database. This worked great when there was actually a match.
But the Places database is far from complete. When there was no match, the results could be disastrous and end up moving events from one state to another, to a different country, or, as you have seen, having people get christened or married in a cemetery.
Initially, we were asked to report any errors we noticed. More recently we have been told that the team working slowly through the massive amount of data they have to look at have enough examples and are gradually getting all the problems corrected. But this is going to take time so it may be a while before your request #4 is completed
II. Bug in the Search routine.
I just wanted to mention that there is a frequently reported problem when using the Search routine. The results lists apparently uses the same auto-standardizing routine because you can run across situations where the place name is just fine in the indexed record but is a mess in the results lists. I work in some Norwegian census records where the location of Søndre Bergenhus is abbreviated as SB. When searching, the results list converts SB to Solomon Islands. The developers must be aware of this by now and we can only hope they are working on a fix.
III. Errors and Deficiencies in the Places Database.
The best way to report these is to follow the procedure listed in: however for complicated issues needing a full explaination of what needs to be changed I would jump right to the bottom of that page and use the e-mail address placefeedback@familysearch.org
@russellwaltgeorge1 is part of the Places Authority team. If he sees your request here for database improvements for White Hall, he may be able to get someone working on that for you fairly soon.
Looking at the wikipedia article, it looks like the name for White Hall was pretty flexible prior to 1835. If you were editing the Places database, what you would like to see as the main display name and as alternate names for the area in 1750? 1780? 1830? It needs to be called something at each of those times.
Currently it's full list of names is:
Each time period for a place can have a different Display Name chosen from this list. The full list appears under each time period.
Clearly conflating the cemetery (which is what is sitting under the 1862 to Today tab in the image above) with the unincorporated town was an error that should be easy for them to correct. Also adding White Hall District as a Variant Name should be simple.
One question would be whether White Hall District, the election district, should be a separate place in the database at all or if it should just be merged into this entry.
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Looking into this.
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@Gordon Collett , thanks for your insights; they have been very helpful. Just to circle back on one item—my first point about cemetery names being preferred over other locale names—I did just notice this when the new placenames system came online. Also, consider the substantial evidence (is this just coincidence) from one county, in addition to the case in my original post—
[The actual placename a year ago—>New preferred placename]
Moormans River, Albemarle, Virginia—>Mount Moriah Methodist Church Cemetery
Crozet, Albemarle, Virginia—>Hillsboro Cemetery
Free Union, Albemarle, Virginia—>Free Union Baptist Church Cemetery
Ivy, Albemarle, Virginia—>Hardindale Cemetery
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Yes, I see a lot of these in the Norwegian records I work in. These are not items the Places team can do anything about. It's a different team working on correcting the historical record indexes. These are the unintended consequences of an automated routine.
(This is not the first time something like this has happened which is why whenever a user of FamilyTree posts a suggestion here in Community along the lines of "Why don't you just run a routine in Family Tree that will automatically correct ….." there is quickly a huge chorus of "NO!!!!!")
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We are in the process of correcting the places in Virginia which have a cemetery or church as the parent of other places. This was done in error by a volunteer.
The correct structure should be:
Anticipated hierarchical structure (general to specific): Country, State, County, City/Town/Village/Hamlet then church or cemetery etc.
We do have cemeteries as places to help people find information from the memorials. As you noted, however they never should be a parent of other places. Sometimes we do have a related place to a church.
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