Hi, Corey — I'm a bit behind on my LUG reading, so you may have already heard about this or you may have already come to your own conclusions on the matter. However...
If you publish your family tree anywhere or for anyone, you might want to consider how the addresses might show up in your published data. I routinely publish my tree on Rootsweb (a free place to store lineage-linked databases). When I had my grandmother's birth location as "On the family farm near Wapinitia, Wasco County, Oregon, USA" or my great-great-grandmother's birth location as "Back Street, Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland" — both of which are more precise locations — both would also fail to come up in search results on Rootsweb. Most people searching a database for someone are going to look for a city or town name, not a street address. Anyone looking for folks born in (or near) Wapinitia did not my grandmother; likewise, searches for people born in Kilmarnock omitted my g-g-grandmother. When I changed the address form to simply "Wapinitia, Wasco County, Oregon" (and put the notes about the family farm into the description field — likewise changing the other location to "Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland"), THEN my relatives would show up properly in Rootsweb search results. Now it's possible the searches have gotten better in the last few years than they were when I first started doing my addresses. But my point is... consider how bumping the town name up from the first sorted field to the second sorted field MIGHT affect things to places and situations where your routinely publish your data. If all you do is create reports for family members, and you use Legacy to create those reports, then I see no reason NOT to have multiple precise locations added to your master location list. But if you are exporting your data where it will be viewed by another program or source, then you might want to leave it so that in your master locations your first field is for town, second field for state or province, etc. cheers, Kirsty Haining Seattle, Washington :-) -----Original Message----- From: Wendy Howard [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 7:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] Suggestions for Locations vs Addresses? Hi Corey, I put full addresses in the Location field, have done for quite a while now after reading about it here on this list from others who did the same - though I still have some in the Address field from before I changed my mind about these things - I'll get those cleaned up one day when I've got nothing better to do or it impacts on something I'm working on (ie, right now it is not urgent to me to do this). I don't see any problem with having a lot of entries in your Location Master List - it is very easy to manipulate the list to find what you want if it's not immediately apparent. Don't forget you're not restricted to four fields here - if memory serves (don't forget I'm blonde and my memory isn't always what I'd like it to be!), Legacy can cope with up to nine fields, and you can sort by any combination of them you choose. I find the right-to-left and left-to-right sorts are all that I need for most purposes, and these are quickly and easily set. With the right-to-left sort you can see all the locations in the same general area, and spot locations that could use a bit of tidying up - you may have a county incorrectly spelled or missing in one, for example, and it will stand out from the others by the way it has sorted. Using the Location field like this means it's easy to track where a location is used more than once. With street addresses, for example, it quickly becomes apparent when different members of a family lived at the same address, or nearby. Just this week I've also added ships to the Location field. One of my 2x-great-grandfathers served in the Royal Navy for many years, and I have a copy of his naval record which shows the ships he served on along with the dates of arrival and departure for each. I first started out entering the ship's name in the Description field, with a new event for each assignment, but I quickly realised this was going to result in a lot of duplication as he frequently returned to ships he'd served on before. With the ships, I edited the location's preposition so it reads "on" instead of "in" in reports, otherwise I entered the name of the ship along with a brief description of the ship and the years it served, so as to distinguish it from others with the same name should they turn up in any future records (eg "HMS Cleopatra (C-class light cruiser 1915-1931)"). A portion of his chronology report looks like this: 1888 Dec 1-1889 Oct 16 Military Service: HMS Vernon (shore establishment 1876-1996) 1889 Oct 17-1892 Oct 26 Military Service: HMS Scout (torpedo cruiser 1885-1904) 1891 Mar 9 Marriage (1): Malta. Catherine Catson 1891 Apr 27 Daughter born (1-#1): Malta, Senglea. Louisa Margret Julia Roberts 1892 Oct 27-1896 Feb 15 Military Service: HMS Vernon (shore establishment 1876-1996) 1893 Mar 29 Son born (1-#2): Malta. George Frederick Roberts I'm sure some reading this are shaking their heads at my unconvential use of the Location field, but it works for me and that's what's important - make your database work the way you want it to. Hope this helps. :-) Kind Regards, Wendy Corey Kennedy said the following on 25/12/2013 2:46 p.m.: > > Hello, > > I currently put street addresses for a Residence event in the > description fields, because in the past, I wanted to keep my Master > Location List as slim as possible to maintain it easier, and if I > attach an Address to the Residence event, you do not see the detail in > most views, without opening it separately. > > Now with geo coding and mapping, I rather like the idea of linking > actual addresses to events to utilize complete mapping. However, > again, I do not like the idea of not seeing the information in a list > format with the other primary Event info (i.e. location, description, > date). > > I am considering adding address information to individual locations. > Therefore, in any given town, there may be multiple addresses added to > the Master Location list. > > I do not use Addresses very much anyway except for Source > Repositories. It seems like a lot of extra excess data input for my > preferred application. > > Any suggestions on best practices? Anyone use addresses as locations > already? Feedback welcome! > > Thanks! > > - > > Corey Kennedy > 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
