* Saint and Street format conventions

[Gardengirl]

I would like to know if there are any established conventions for entering church and street names in Place and Address fields. I know I have been very inconsistent in this and the small bits of punctuation are important when doing searches so I would like to chose one and stick to it but which one?

For a church or place .... St Mary or St. Mary or St Mary's or St. Mary's or St Marys or St. Marys?

For a street.... High St or High St. or High Street ?

[jbtapscott]

For a church, I normally google it and, in many cases, find the church website - this then gives a pretty good direction as to what the church is actually called. In some cases, I have actually found that the St Mary bit should actually be St.... & St Mary or words to that effect. Failing a church website then the local parish website may help.

For street / road, I tend to use whatever is used on the source document - this detail goes in the Address fields so is not so much of an issue for, say, geocoding.

[Gardengirl]

My question was more about how much or how little punctuation to use, particularly . and '

What conventions do you use?

[jbtapscott]

My point with the churches is that the website will normally show the "correct" positioning and that is what I use. If I cannot find a formal reference to the church then I omit the '.

In the case of road / street, most records I have used have the road / street words in full, but where they don't then I do not use a period after the abbreviated form (which I know others will disagree on!).

[tatewise]

Even formal documents don't always use the same form for the same Address.
The transcript in the Source record should use whatever the document uses.
However, in the Address field, it is useful to use the same format for the same address everywhere it applies.

I would tend to spell out road names in full.

For churches, I usually use St.Mary without a space, so that text searches don't have to cope with two words St. and Mary.

The overriding strategy is to be consistent and use the same format everywhere.

[Gowermick]

With Road, Street etc, I use the full word without abbreviation.
For a church, I tend to omit the ‘s, as some are shown with it and some without. Autotext entry helps in this regard, as once a name is entered, I tend to accept whatever autotext suggests. As for the period after St, I omit this too, purely so to save typing an extra character

Saying all that, I still have ended up with a mixture of church name styles, and no consistency. I’ll eventually get around to correcting them someday.
They will then appear as St Mary, or SS Peter & Paul i.e. with no apostrophe and no period.

[Gardengirl]

Thank you, Brent and both Mikes. I like the idea of St.Mary without a space and I think the full street, road, avenue or whatever is probably a good solution. And apostrophes, although grammatically correct, are not really necessary in this context.

Autotext is definitely the way forward and having read some threads recently highlighting the use of Find and Replace, I can quite easily fix my previous inconsistencies once I have made up my mind which format to use.

[Mark1834]

Another point that has not been made so far is that the general convention in British English today is not to use a full stop for abbreviations (except perhaps for an initial letter representing a name), but American English still uses them extensively.

I write street names in full (High Street, for example) when entering address fields, but always abbreviate church names (Chelsea St Luke, for example) and usually place names (Bury St Edmunds, for example) unless the full name is always used.

For transcripts, I generally record verbatim from the original document, which can lead to some less common forms (High-street in a probate record for example), but do consistently use full stops for initials with no space between multiple examples in census transcripts and similar (D.J. Smith, for example).

[dewilkinson]

As has already been said I think it is best to adopt a convention and stick to it. Out of interest I use St. Mary's Church opposed to just St. Mary in case I am referring to the parish. I spell out Road and Street in full (but use St. if like 'St. James Road' and use 'and' not '&'. Just my personal preference

[tatewise]

Yes, there are always exceptions.
Bury St Edmunds is a good example where neither St. nor Saint is advisable.
I might be tempted to drop the space in St.James Road

Also, remember the trick to differentiate one St.Marys from all other St.Marys where that is the only Address field information available. Add some distinguishing name from the Place such as St.Marys, [[Newtown]] but enclosed in privacy brackets.
Without that Tools > Work with Data > Addresses... will list St.Marys just once and you have no easy way to edit the Address of just the St.Marys in Newtown.
But with [[Newtown]] added they are all distinct and you can add the street, etc, to St.Marys, [[Newtown]] without any hasstle.

[Gardengirl]

Privacy Brackets - never heard of them before but will make a note (then probably forget again until I next get in a muddle and someone reminds me)

[tatewise]

See FH Help > Family Historian Help > General Topics > Private Notes which it explains also apply to Address, etc.

[Gardengirl]

Thank you

[AdrianBruce]

Are privacy brackets respected in Diagrams' text in v7? (Because they're not in v6, which cuts off one line of approach for a dedicated diagrammer like me).

[tatewise]

Both FH V6 & V7 honour [[privacy brackets]] in Note fields but not in Address.
See Diagram > Options > General tab half way down on left.

[AdrianBruce]

Both FH V6 & V7 honour [[privacy brackets]] in Note fields but not in Address.

Ach! Still cut off from easily using Addresses like "St. Matthew's[[,Haslington, Cheshire, England]]" for diagrams...!

[tatewise]

Strangely, the identical Inc. [[private]] Notes option in Reports does honour [[private]] brackets in Address.
So, logically, it should do the same in Diagrams. Have you ever reported that anomaly to Calico Pie?

[AdrianBruce]

Strangely, the identical Inc. [[private]] Notes option in Reports does honour [[private]] brackets in Address.
So, logically, it should do the same in Diagrams. Have you ever reported that anomaly to Calico Pie?

I have - #440137 "Private text in Diagram Text Schemes" on 22 November 2017 (thank you GMail - for once I actually found something in it!)

[AdrianBruce]

I can't resist adding this example of how reality manages to confuse us. Or me at any rate.

As some of you will know, the City of Bristol has districts known as (e.g.) "St. Paul's". I've just added a marriage of someone at St. Barnabas there, and in the diagram, the way I have my text scheme, the marriage is recorded as taking place at "St. Barnabas, St. Paul's, Bristol".

Confused? You will be...

[victor]

I would use St.Barnabas Church in the address part not the place name part.
Place name...St.Paul;s, Bristol, Somerset, England
Address ...St.Barnabas Church
Victor

[tatewise]

Adrian has combined the Address field with the Place field in his text scheme, but adding the word Church would help.

[AdrianBruce]

Adding "Church" - that would make more sense in the diagram - thanks for the idea.

[AdrianBruce]

Although on reflection, the oddity is actually "St. Paul's" so adjusting that to be "St. Paul's Ward", or whatever it actually is, would let the church's name remain standard.

Need to do a bit of digging to work out what type of thing those districts actually are.

[Martin Tolley]

We Brits don't make it easy. I have a family with a baptism recorded in St Mary's Church in the eclesiastical district of St Andrew who live in St James St. (!)

[Gardengirl]

We Brits don't make it easy. I have a family with a baptism recorded in St Mary's Church in the eclesiastical district of St Andrew who live in St James St. (!)