This month, I’d like you to work on the places found in all genealogical information.
By the way, why should we care about places?
The information may seem secondary, but there are at least three good reasons to pay attention to it:
First of all, knowing where an event took place enables you to search for sources of information. How else can you know, for example, which departmental archives to search?
Secondly, knowing the locations of our ancestors’ events enables us to map them and see where branches of a family have lived over the centuries. It’s a great way to enrich your genealogy publication with a beautiful map.
Last but not least, the location of events is extremely useful for researching potential ascendants or descendants when looking for information. For example, for a person, his parents’ marriage probably took place in the mother’s home town (and within 5 to 10 years of his birth).
The collection of places should therefore be done for all sources of information.
How do you name the places?
If you’ve started researching information about the members of your family tree, you’ve no doubt already been confronted with the difficulty of knowing how to name the places mentioned in the events of your ancestors’ lives.
Contrary to what you might think, the subject is not trivial…
Place names are not invariant
Over the course of eras, wars and administrative reforms, the names of our regions, départements and even towns can change. Not to mention renamed streets and avenues.
The genealogist will therefore have to choose between noting places as they appear in the documents he or she has looked through, or using their current names.
In the first case, the genealogist stays as close as possible to the information obtained, which is a good thing, as it is always advisable not to change any information. On the other hand, the genealogist runs the risk of not being able to use this information to group together information and geolocate places (on the Internet, for example).
In the second case, the genealogist will use the current name and risk losing the one used at the time of the event. If the genealogist publishes his work, he will introduce a certain historical distortion into the names (for example, the Plantagenets’ Anjou was not in Pays de Loire…).
As always, there is no ideal solution. If I have to choose, I prefer to recommend the first approach, which is more in line with historical accuracy. The fact remains that almost all genealogy software does not allow you to identify a place with several names, so you’ll have to accept that some places may appear under several names.
Place names are not written the same for everyone
Beyond the passage of time (or wars or administrative reforms), places are not always known by the same name. For example, a Frenchman might speak of Florence (in Italy), while an Italian might use the name “Firenze”.
Once again, a choice has to be made: should we use the place names in the genealogist’s language, or should we use the name in the place’s national language? We also need to think about the readers of the genealogist’s work: what will be the most natural solution for them for naming places?
It seems to me that the main question is to consider how your readers will prefer to read your genealogy. If you don’t publish your work, use the way you prefer to write down the places you want to research.
Place names must be standardized
In addition to the spelling you use, don’t forget that places are entered into genealogy software according to a structure that not only identifies the place, but also its administrative classification.
This structure often takes the following form: “place, commune, department, region, country”. The information is separated by commas, and any missing information must be replaced by a space. Your genealogy software can then build a hierarchy of places starting from the right (in our example): Country / Region / Department / Town / Locality..
As the structures are closely linked to the administrative divisions of the various countries, the GEDCOM standard does not specify how this information should be written.
The safest thing to do is to follow the instructions given by your genealogy software, otherwise you won’t be able to classify places in the hierarchy, and you won’t be able to transmit this information to an Internet site, for example.
Place names must be geolocated
If you can – that is, if your software allows it – always remember to geolocate the places used in your genealogy.
Geolocating a place means adding its coordinates (longitude and latitude) to your information. These coordinates are used to place a marker on a map, enabling you to display the locations of your ancestors on beautiful maps.
These two pieces of information are also particularly useful for finding out whether two events took place in the same geographical area. This information is used by some software programs to perform proximity searches between events, such as the birth of a child and the marriage of the parents.
In conclusion,
- don’t neglect locations when gathering information;
- use a method that suits you for your work and publications, and apply it to all your work;
- geolocate locations.
Did you know that there’s a solution for finding potential ancestors and descendants using geolocation coordinates?
This article is part of our “12 Labors of the genealogist” series.
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