Mary Identifying locations in England is quite easy!! (ho ho).
Firstly as England is not part of the USA, we do not recognise the "normal" format that you imply. The largest geographical entity in England is (or was until politicians started interfering with our structures) the County. Some Counties are colloquially known as Shire Counties (eg. Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Devonshire) but they are otherwise no different to any other County. (aside - why don't we call some of the other counties the Sex Counties? - Essex, Sussex etc) The next layer down is a town or city - a city is only a town that has been granted that status in the form of a charter from the Queen (and not to be confused with cathedral cities). Then you have the surrounding villages or minor towns. But to confuse the situation, for the very major conurbations (such as London, Birmingham, Manchester etc) there will usually be a town name given to identify which part of the area. (e.g. Manningham in Bradford) and some of these may also identify a smaller village/town name. It is probably easier in the more rural counties, where you just need to identify the town/village and County (eg Burrington, Devon) Personally I do not add ", England" in the same way that I don't add England on an envelope when I post a letter. So, I don't think there is an automatic and standard "4 field" way of writing a location. Personally, I just work from smallest to largest as appropriate to the area, but the County is always the largest. The other three countries of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) are broken down in similar sorts of way. The only thing I would do differently is to add the country name. How to deal with pre and post partition Ireland, how to deal with recent events where we have a lot of places that are not in "political" Counties (Middlesex, Berkshire etc) and where towns have moved from one County to another - that's another thorny subject. But the direct answer is that Counties are NOT states! the United Kingdom is the only state that we recognise. Overall, the location is a way to attempt to uniquely identify where something occurred and, where possible, we try to be consistent in how it is presented. But just as with the quirks of the English language, there are many quirks in how to represent a location (for the same reason - we originated from a diverse set of nations pre 1066) Jack -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of M. Brenzel Sent: 20 April 2005 02:21 To: 'Legacy Users Group' Subject: [LegacyUG] Locations in England Those of you doing research in England, how do you identify the locations for your events following the normal format of city, county, state, country? Are the shires counties or states? Mary 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
