* Place Hierarchy - Where to enter and does FH7 use it?

Questions about managing place and address information, and using maps and geocoding
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KFN
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Place Hierarchy - Where to enter and does FH7 use it?

Post by KFN »

Does FH7 have a place to enter the default Place Hierarchy or event specific Place Hierarchy? I want to get your interpretation of its usefulness or value!

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AdrianBruce
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Re: Place Hierarchy - Where to enter and does FH7 use it?

Post by AdrianBruce »

Never use it!

I'm actually confused by the text in the GEDCOM Specification. This is an example from an experimental GEDCOM file of mine:
2 PLAC Barthomley, Cheshire, England
3 FORM x, y, z

The PLAC is the place-name. The FORM is the place-heirarchy. The definition of place-hierarchy says
This shows the jurisdictional entities that are named in a sequence from the lowest to the highest jurisdiction. The jurisdictions are separated by commas, and any jurisdiction's name that is missing is still accounted for by a comma.
It is entirely unclear to me from this text whether the jurisdictional entities in question are the types of jurisdiction or the actual jurisdictions. In other words, is it supposed to be:

2 PLAC Barthomley, Cheshire, England
3 FORM Barthomley parish, Cheshire, England

or
2 PLAC Barthomley, Cheshire, England
3 FORM parish, county, country

It talks about a FORM in the file header where the latter interpretation is the only viable one.

Either way, I never use it - if there is any value in specifying the type, I'll usually add type names as part of the place names, e.g.
2 PLAC Killowney Little townland, Ballymackey parish, County Tipperary, Ireland
Adrian
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ColeValleyGirl
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Re: Place Hierarchy - Where to enter and does FH7 use it?

Post by ColeValleyGirl »

As (almost) always you can add it via the All tab -- navigate to the place associated with a fact, and it's in the right click menu.

It feels like something included in GEDCOM to enable clever analysis, but I rarely need to do clever analysis so I can't think of a use case for myself. Especially as it just doubles the data entry for entering a place.
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KFN
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Re: Place Hierarchy - Where to enter and does FH7 use it?

Post by KFN »

Thank you both for your reply.

I realize that I can add the hierarchy via the "All Tab", but I was not sure if there was some other place that I could add it and that we also had some "help" text for it.

I wanted to see if the "FORM" was used by FH7 in some way, since I'm not an expert in using FH7.

GEDCOM kind of expects the following:

Code: Select all

2 PLAC Barthomley, Cheshire, England
3 FORM parish, county, country
With the HEAD.FORM used as the default. (A useless concept since many times people are research 3 or more countries, with different types for their divisions, and historically the division types can change as they have in Norway)

FH7 could use the above entry to print out "Barthomley Parish in Cheshire County in the country of England", But I don't see the point, when I could just enter most of that in the PLAC tag, and actually get it correct for some places (Ireland?) that actually say "County" before the place name!

But so far my research of use by the software I've used this GEDCOM element has no value or use beyond "clever analysis" by some German software in building a "world place repository". In 40 years of using GEDCOM I found it had little use and removed it from all GEDCOMs I produced with my own software.
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