General Chat

Why has the automatic place search suddenly disappeared when I'm entering places of birth and death? This was so useful. :-S

The best people to ask are Support

[email protected]

However, when it was introduced, quite a few people complained. This was because the suggested place was based on current governmental areas, rather than historical.
Many of my family came from Edmonton - when they were born, married or died it was part of Middlesex, now its part of Greater London which was incorrect for the period.

Other people were frustrated as they wanted to put in the exact address.

Thanks for that. I will ask support, as you suggest, when I'm back on my computer. :-)

and many places that were in Westmorland are now under Cumbria ...............

that's hopeless for family research

Greater Manchester didn't exist .............

etc etc etc


I would guess it might have been discontinued because of the very legitimate concerns about using modern geographical terms for 100 or more years ago.

Ancestry have a similar function which is quite good on historical counties offering the option of, say, South Yorkshire or Yorkshire West Riding. Less helpfully for many of the customers it tells them that GGF lived in Surrey / Middlesex / Kent when they thought he lived in London lol.

Two things though really irritate me and Ay refuse to fix them.

(a) many UK place names have a twin in the USA and Ancestry defaults to the US location. Careless use of this has created any amount of nonsense on Ay trees some of which has crept into GR.

(b) some feckless programmer was given the job of predicting which UK county any town, city might be in. AFAICS he assumed some sort of grid system for counties. The result is that towns are often one county and sometimes two out. There is no ryhme or reason to it - I have seen Colchester, Essex placed in Essex, Hertfordshire or even Oxfordshire!

If GR have dropped this "feature" it is a wise move.

Tip 1: the whole OS 7th series map of the UK is online free
http://maps.nls.uk/os/one-inch-seventh-series/

Tip 2: the site www.freebmd.org.uk has an option to find out more about the units which make up a R.D. This can be very useful especially when used with the OS Map and census data. It takes account of changes over time.

Thank you all for your comments. Explains the reasoning which I now understand and accept :-)

Can I add that I left the UK in 1967 ............... and in many cases county lines and even names have changed since that time.

For example ........... Rutland disappeared, then was resurrected.

I'm having a lot of trouble with OH's ancestors who came from that corner in northern England where Lancashire, Yorkshire and Westmorland all seem to meet .......... and many parts of which are now called Cumbria!

I didn't like the automatic place.... and I often wondered if the people who set it up had ever looked at a map.

Example............ Sydney, Western Australia :-S

Last time I was in Sydney it was in NSW.

I give a place of birth/marriage/death as it was named when the event happened, not what it has been changed to (and often changed back again).

Another complication (which I kept correcting on Ancestry until I understood) was how many of our North Northumberland family were listed with the correct place name but described as being in Co. Durham. At last I found out that many of the sources were from church records and much of the area earlier came under the Bishopric of Durham.

I didn't like the automatic function.

My family history shows that my OH's ancestry from more than 200 yrs ago, lies in the same Lanarkshire town where we live

On entering the town where his ancestors ( and we) were born, the automatic setting produces "South Lanarkshire"
This is correct..... for present day.

SLC didn't exist, not even when our OWN children were born in the 1980's and 90's

It was only formed in 1992 !

:-D

Hi all,

There is an error with this that was reported to our technical team last week to be fixed. We do not have an estimated time at the moment for it to be working again.

Community Manager

Thank you.

London Metropo;itan Archives are just as frustrating.
Records are indexed under current London boroughs e.g. Havering or Redbridge and not Romford (was Essex); Barking or Walthamstow etc.