Hi, Keith, BE, Tom and other listers - I also have been working with locations as I recently switched to Legacy. In fact, the handling of addresses was one of my major concerns and reservations about switching to the program in the first place. While I understand that keeping your locations to a consistent and limited format (city, county, state, country) makes good database sense (and computer programming sense), I wasn't sure that it was necessarily good from the POV of genealogy and sharing information.
What convinced me was doing a search on Rootsweb on all family trees, looking for someone in my own tree. Because I had a non-standard location in my grandmother's field (basically, it included street address information), the Rootsweb search engine could not find her in my own tree (although it found her in other people's trees). I know not all genealogy programs are set up to handle addresses the way Legacy does. And not all search engines will fail to recognize a city name if it has other information before it. But I figure the future of sharing information across multiple software programs and platforms will head in the direction that Legacy is going, simply because it DOES make good programming sense. Tom, concerning your non-conventional location entry method, my comment for you (and anyone else who may be considering your method) is simply to remember that other programs that may use this data may have a problem with this format. You may not think you'll be using any other programs, but you may still wish to share your data with other family genealogists, and that person may run into problems if they're using different software. Keith, you are also revising location information just like I am. Concerning your query about what to put in the "name field" for an event location, I thought I'd put in my own 2 cents. BE Kelly suggested perhaps using a name for who lived there, perhaps with a qualifier that it was a birth address. My own method is to have the "name" of the event address simply be the street address, followed by a comma, and then the city name. So "123 Main Street, Anytown" would be the "name" of my event address. The reason I settled upon using this method of naming event addresses was because I tried naming them after the individuals who lived there, and it ended up not being a practical method for me. I found that the same physical location was shared by many different individuals, and sometimes even passed down through generations. So naming an address after a particular individual (or family surname) didn't make a lot of sense. By simply using the actual street address and city as the name, it makes it quite easy when I have to re-use the event address for another individual using that same event address. So these are my thoughts on location addresses, for what it's worth. cheers, Kirsty Haining Seattle, WA :-) -----Original Message----- Tom Montgomery wrote: >>Me? I don't follow a lot of the conventional thinking for location entry and this is an example. I would simply add the street data to the community and have it read: "Middlesbrough (25 Willow Street), Yorkshire, England" If this is a family home I would say that as well: "Middlesbrough (Bage family home at 25 Willow Street), Yorkshire, England". I like to do it this way as it is "in your face" when working on the family and marriage screen(s). Will also use event entry occasionally but only when it gets rather complicated and could be confusing. Has never created a problem for me and looks just fine in reports.<< BE Kelly wrote: >>1. The Name field would be for the name of the resident or institution just like a mailing address. Alternatively you could use the name of the individual and a post name qualifier like birth, death, christening etc for the various addresses. If the person was born, christened or died in an institution the name of the institution could be used because several people in the same town could be born and/or died at the local hospital, christened in the parish church etc. Same for burial the name of the cemetery could be the name part of the address.<< Keith Bage wrote: > I am revisiting my location address dilemma. I am really struggling with > this. > > I understand that I enter my location address like this "Middlesbrough, > Yorkshire, England" > > BUT, for my birth I'd like to enter "25 Willow Street" presumably in the > event address. > > My questions are > > 1. In this case what goes in the name fields? If I leave this blank the list > shows n/a. In such a case (which most of mine are) how do I find the address > again as everything in the location list is named n/a. > 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
