With some states it *can* take a lot more keystrokes to spell out the name. If you're talking about Utah or Idaho, it might not be so bad, but Mississippi, California, Massachusetts, etc, you're talking about a LOT of keystrokes! I used to spell out states when I was using another program and when I printed out reports, esp trees with boxes, the program would truncate the location to something completely not understandable because there wasn't enough room in the boxes. Imagine - Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California trying to fit into a one inch box!!! And there are even longer locations than that! I wonder if the solution would be to ignore the two letter postal codes and go back to the old style - Calif, Wash, Mass, etc which would be more understandable, but still shortening the location enough to be reasonable. BTW, I've seen abbreviations used in several other countries and with a good map and a little deduction, I've never had any problem figuring out where the location was. I should hope that no family researcher is so narrow-sighted as to ignore learning about the countries involved in the family lines they're researching to the point where they can't even recognize common locality abbreviations! Sherry At 02:35 AM 1/29/00 , Lance wrote: >Abbreviations are only useful in the country of origin (i.e. USA). Once you >GEDCOM your records somewhere overseas they are completely meaningless to >the vast majority of researchers. The cardinal rule should be spell out >everything in your records all the time - it doesn't take many more key >strokes to accomplish it.
