syoung replied that a good reason for the geo location database was: > The best reason is for accuracy, consistancy and completeness of location > information. It makes it easy to tell which county a town is in, for > example - and even alerts you to some problems, like putting a town in > Iredell County, North Carolina, before 1788. It would have been Rowan from > 1753 to 1788 - and Anson for 4 years before that, and so on.
The Geo-base may do some of those things, but it seems to me that it can work against accuracy! When I record a location, I record what the source says, even if I know the source was wrong, misspelled or out of date. That is being consistent to me. For example, my database contains events that happened in Lachine, Quebec, Canada. They don't all say exactly that: "Lachine, Quebec, Canada". They say what the source says. Some sources say "Lachine, Quebec", others say "Lachine, Canada", and still others say "Lachine, Montreal, Quebec". All can be correct, if incomplete. As I understand Qu�bec history (oh yeah forgot about minor spelling differences for accented and unaccented characters!) Lachine was founded on the south side of the fairly large Island of Montreal, which was/is called Mont Royal(?). For some time Lachine was an indpendent village, so it's location would have properly been Lachine, Ille de Montreal, Quebec, Nouvelle France. Then as Montreal grew, Lachine (and other villages on the island) got absorbed into the greater metroplolis, and these formerly independent villages/towns are now "merely" districts of Montreal. So there was a time when it was a part of Montreal and a time when it wasn't. So it's "correct" name depends on the time of the event! But even more important to me, is that if I write that a source says that somebody was born in "Lachine, Montreal, Quebec, Canada", then that is incorrect if the source actually said "Lachine, PQ". I would be misquoting the source. It doesen't really depend on whether Lachine was independent or not. It depends only on what the source actually says. That is a bigger error than being consistent IMO. In my database, Montr�al, Qu�bec is listed about 4 or five times as a master location, because it's there under different spellings and variations as found in the various sources which I try to cite as exactly as possible. Only exception is that I will expand abbreviations, because abbreviations should be avoided IMO. So the above example of "Lachine, PQ" will get expanded to "Lachine, Quebec", because I know that PQ is an abbreviation for Province of Quebec. 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
