Genealogy Chat

I know this has probably been discussed before, and my apologies to all for 'going on' about it BUT.. Could the parameters for place of birth entries be set so that the country/county came first, followed by the town or village. It would be much easier to look for possible matches that way, especially if anyone knew the general area but not the detail.

A lot of us loaded from gedcom to start with and this gave some interesting place names configs. If you have a large tree it takes time to change all the entries, Especially if youre hard at work trying to find new ones

What about all the entries put in without a place at all, and even worse without place or date, how can they hope to make a connection. I agree it would be helpful if names were sorted by county, I now find it simplest to go through the entire alphabet sorted by place of birth when checking for relatives to cater for all the possible variables on the places of birth of my ancestors, but think that even if it as as vague as Northern England or South Wales this is preferable to no information at all, and a potential place of birth should be a compulsory not optional field. I have been through and added counties to all my entries. It is a bit labourious, but copy and paste can be used to do it. It would be really helpful if people corrected their typos as well which would cut down on the odd strays located in unique place names.

I'm afraid I can't agree that this is better than "town, county, country". Under your system everything would be under E for England. I'm not searching through hundreds of thousands of towns listed under 'E' to find the place I'm after!!!! Another thing is that places have fallen under different counties at different times in history. So looking under 'U' would show entires for Ulverston, Lancashire and Ulverston, Cumbria (same town different times). This doesn't work if you put county first. As Alison has said many of us have database of 500-10,000 indiviudals, I'm not going to go through and amend all those entries. The accepted way of expressing locations is town, county, country. The search field allows you to simply enter a county if this suits you.

Stuart, Yes I can see your point, and those who have made their entries in a systematic way are usually not a problem, it is those who are not clear what is needed, and who have not added any place of birth, or a vague woolly, misspelled or obviously geographically wrong entry who are not helping themselves or anyone else since it will be impossible for them or others to find a match. It will be hard to standardise, since it may well not be possible for people to be as exact as they would like. And offering a gazetteer of place names would probably be too restrictive. Perhaps one option would be to be able to actually search on place names as well as individual names?