How you enter Places information in Reunion? (Standardization, etc)

[Deena B]

Hi. I was wondering how people use the Places information.

Do you record exactly what you see in a record? Do you infer information and normalize place names? Do you put them in from smallest part to largest or vica versa? Do you only record the city or town and larger context or do you put the exact address?

I've been a bit all over the place and I want to get consistent.

Here are some specific challenges:
1) A relative might have multiple documents that give an address in different or partial ways. For example, one relative lived at 132 Intervale St, Roxbury, MA, USA. But, on various documents, this address might look like:
132 Intervale, Rox
132 Intervale St, Roxbury, MA
132 Intervale St, Boston
132 Intervale St, Boston City, Suffolk, Massachusetts

Roxbury is a neighborhood of Boston and has been since before my ancestors lived there. So in the time frame I'm dealing with, would you usually use the more specific place even if it isn't specified in the record? Would you list both like "132 Intervale St, Roxbury, Boston City, Suffolk, MA, USA" or "132 Intervale St, Roxbury [Boston], MA".

County is a good part of my question. The county is usually only listed on census records so when I have the address from the census record it has the county but most other records do not. Do you create one normalized record for a place and use that place name regardless of what is on the exact record that is your source? Or do you have a proliferation of variations of the same place in your place lists?

2) If you have a lot of family in the USA, do you put USA at the end of all your place names? I was omitting it as I felt it was obvious and it took up space on reports but I do always put other country names in and was wondering about consistency.

3) On FamilySearch and other websites, they don't put the specific address, just the locality like Roxbury, Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA. I really value the street address information as it helps with research. Do you put that in your place names or do you use the memo field for the specific street address? Do you enter it like "132 Intervale St, Boston, MA, USA" or in reverse like " USA, MA, Suffolk, Boston, 132 Intervale St"

4) Shtetls in the Russian Empire. A large chunk of my family hails from the Pale of Settlement. The names of places on documents are often very confusing and the transliteration of place names makes it challenging as well as the fact that people gave information sometimes relevant to their current time period and not for the time period when the place was relevant.

For example, one part of my family came from a place which is in present day Lithuania: Akmene. In the various records over time, this would be written Okmyjany, Akmian, Akmiany, or "Okmiany, Russia" or "Akmene, Lithuania" -- but the latter didn't exist at the time my relatives lived there in the Russian Empire. It's easy to identify once you know what you are looking for but how do you record it in places? Do you put in all the various spellings?

I usually put in the place as it was at the time of the event so if it was Okmyany, Shavli, Kovne, Russian Empire at the time, that's what I'd put in. But even that is confusing because of the language. This language is essentially how the folks who spoke Yiddish would transliterate it but the name now is Akmene, Siauliai, Kaunas, Lithuania. Also, like in English where we might have Suffolk or Suffolk County, sometimes it will say Kovne Gubernia and sometimes just Kovne or Kovno.

Would love any wisdom on this topic.

Thanks,
Deena

[Gildell]

Deena, thanks for posting this question, I’ve started the same effort to standardize my place name data. And I have the same questions. Hopefully someone will give us answers!

michael

[theKiwi]

Take a look at this page on my website which is data from Reunion presented online using the TNG software.

https://lisaandroger.com/genealogy/places.php

This lists the top level/largest entity in all the place names in my database - these are all countries or regions (like At Sea).

Click on any country and you'll see the next division of places inside that country - so in the USA it's states, in England it's Counties, in New Zealand it's Provinces etc. Click down another level you see divisions in that area - eg in a US state it's counties (except Louisiana where they're Parishes).

1 - in all your examples I would use an address that was correct at the time of that address' usage.

So if at one time "132 Intervale St, Roxbury, MA" was correct, I'd enter that as

132 Intervale St, Roxbury, Massachusetts, USA

The if later it fell under a Boston area, use that.

I always spell out state names.

I always use the County as it was at the time of the usage, but abbreviated as "Co."

2 - ALWAYS end a place name with a country name - it's very US centric to assume that anyone anywhere else knows what WA means - maybe it's Western Australia, and not Washington.

3 - including the street address as part of the address lets you drill down further, to the point where you could find all the addresses in a City, And if you look at this page

https://lisaandroger.com/genealogy/places-oneletter.php?offset=3&psearch=Bedford%2C+Bedfordshire%2C+England

you can see the places in Bedford. And while I haven't done this, I have seen people put a , after the street number so a listing by street name shows you all the addresses on that street - so who were neighbours, as opposed to what FamilySearch does where the best you can find is who lived in the same place.

I don't have any ancestry from eastern Europe, so no thoughts on how that might be handled.

Roger