Wow, John. That was great advice! Thanks for taking the time to type that all out :)
Michele -----Original Message----- From: John B. Lisle [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 3:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [LegacyUG] maps? Michele, I geocode locations from all over the world every day with Legacy and know how frustrating it can be. Let me share with you a few things I have learned and how I do it. 1/ If you add US, USA, etc. it can confuse Bing. I think Legacy now strips that off before it sends the location to Bing to geocode. 2/ If you write out the State, it will get more confused than if you use the Postal code for the state; eg, better to geocode TX vs. Texas. 3/ If the state has a city/town by the same name as the county, it will almost always find the city, even if you wanted the county. Putting "Co." or "County" after a county name will help it understand what is a county. If I have the name of the town, I just enter it without the county. 4/ Bing will find a location differently depending on where the map is placed when it goes looking. EG, I have had it fail miserably to find a location when map was far away from location, but when location is in the view, it finds it precisely. 5/ Bing will USUALLY not find townships. 6/ Clean up the naming of the location after you have let Bing find the location. If you let Bing re-place the pin after you have cleaned up the location name, Bing may recode it elsewhere; usually this happens when the county name is same as a city/town name. My process is to enter a new location with the minimum of information and let Bing try to do its thing. Then I edit the location with the old Geocode database and let that try to get the name expanded properly. --> I have significantly edited the GeoCode-xxx.txt files to get the Geocode database to format the names to my naming standards. I compare the location coordinate found from old Geocode with Bing to see that they seem to agree. The old Geocode results are not as precise as Bing, but it will find places that Bing gets wrong. For coding at Country/State/Province/etc. level, I code to the capital. I use Wikipedia extensively to figure out county seats and townships. I code county level locations at the county seat and townships at the major town. I code cemeteries at the cemetery when I can find the location. (FindaGrave is very helpful with that.) I like to enter historical locations which are often NOT in any GeoCode database so I need to find where the location is now and manually place the pin where it needs to be. These systems are smart, but not smart enough. ;-) I go to this trouble because mapping is important to me, and I export the geocodes to my web publishing tool which does extensive mapping of the events for each person. ok? john. Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp Follow Legacy on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LegacyFamilyTree) and on our blog (http://news.LegacyFamilyTree.com). To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
