John, I don't think that you're missing anything!
There are two separate issues when dealing something as complex as both names and locations. Everybody seems to agree on the processing of the names, but not the locations. These two issues are... DATA ENTRY: This is where it is a great help to have separate fields identifying each sub-field so that the person doing the entry gets to specify whether each name being entered is a City, County, Township, State, or whatever. Making this identification available to Legacy will enable it to do much "smarter" logic when processing locations. It also makes it much easier for the person entering data to "get it right". SCREEN/PRINT DISPLAY: This is where it is frequently desirable to have locations strung together in a single field, without extraneous commas for the omitted fields, to enable easier readability. The downside to this, of course, is that the person reading the strung together field will sometimes have no clue which name refers to a City, County, etc., unless that identifying word is added to each subfield. My conclusion is that this can be a vicious circle -- making it easy for someone to read a location without all of the commas showing makes it much more difficult for them to enter it correctly into their own database. Luckily, with names, an omitted Prefix or Suffix doesn't confuse the readability very much, although more than one given name can on rare occasion make it hard to tell what the surname is. For years I was never sure whether the "Van" in "Ricky Van Shelton" was part of the surname or not. It isn't. The slashes around the surname solve that, but they're just so darn ugly!!! I prefer extra commas in locations to slashes in names. ;-) Bob -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John R. Bayle Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 18:20 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] Back to Basics In replying to my posting, Cathy wrote: <big snip> > Certainly, we don't want to go backwards and have separate fields/boxes for > each part of a location. Boy, Cathy you and I sure have different views of this issue! I think a separate field for each location part is a good thing, just like it's a good thing for names. Seems to me that it solves your sorting problems. You just say Sort by counties, and all the Washington counties go together, whether they were in the same state or not. Or you could sort first on counties and then on states. Then all the Washington counties in New York would be together and all the Washington counties in Ohio wold be togther but the NY and OH counties would be separate from each other, etc. Tell me what I'm missing here! jr Legacy User Group Etiquette guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup%40mail.millenniacorp.com/ To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/LegacyLists.asp Legacy User Group Etiquette guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup%40mail.millenniacorp.com/ To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/LegacyLists.asp
