* Places and Addresses when importing from TMG

Importing from another genealogy program? This is the place to ask. Questions about Exporting should go in the Exporting sub-forum of the General Usage forum.
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Phil L
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Places and Addresses when importing from TMG

Post by Phil L »

I’m currently evaluating fh, using data directly imported from my TMG projects (not via GEDCOM). I’m having problems regarding place/address information, and would appreciate some guidance please.

I find that, for instance, text in a person’s Residence tag in TMG is imported en masse into the Place field of the individual’s Facts record in fh, with nothing in the Address field. I was alerted to this issue when I noticed that a relative who lived in “San Remo Towers, Bournemouth” was shown in the Map Window as having lived in ”San Remo, Italy”. I suspect it’s a matter of hand-editing the data in fh, to get the right things into the right fields – is that correct?

I’ve read the “Places and Addresses” section in the very useful FHUK KB. A couple of fictional examples would assist me further in knowing what should be in which field:

TMG Residence tag: 42 Nosuch Road, Sometown, Somecounty, Somecountry
fh Place field: Sometown, Somecounty, Somecountry
fh Address field: 42 Nosuch Road

TMG Birth tag: New Hospital, Nosuch Road, Sometown, Somecounty, Somecountry
fh Place field: Sometown, Somecounty, Somecountry
fh Address field: New Hospital, Nosuch Road

Is the above a reasonable approach, with no information duplicated in the two fields? Or is there a better way?

As a related issue, I used Single Exclusion Markers in TMG, such as -England in Residence tags. The hyphens have been transferred into fh. Is there a way of removing them with a global edit?

Any comments on the above would be greatly appreciated – thank you!
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tatewise
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Re: Places and Addresses when importing from TMG

Post by tatewise »

Welcome to the FHUG Phil.

Your general concepts are correct, but there are some further considerations.

The San Remo effect is quite common in geocoding services.
If such a place name is very well known then it can take precedence over a lesser known place such as Bournemouth.
It usually arises in situations like your example where a house or building name includes the well known place name.
That is one reason for keeping Place and Address separate, but read on below...
The geocoding can be corrected manually once you have spotted it.
Alternatively, a Plugin can be used for geocoding that will ignore such names enclosed in "string quotes".

Your Place and Address separation strategy is conventionally correct in GEDCOM terms.
However, in FH only the Place field is geocoded and mapped and thus is not very granular.
So some users prefer to keep the address & place details all in the Place field to achieve more granular mapping.

A snag particularly with church addresses is their road is often not known.
So you can have several St. Marys Church identical Address fields but for different Place names.
There are global editing features, but they cannot differentiate one St. Marys Church from another.
So if you discover that the St. Marys Church in Sometown, Somecounty, Somecountry is in Rectory Road then it is quite tricky to update just the appropriate Address entries.
The solution either involves putting address & place details together as above for granular mapping, or adding some duplication from the Place into the Address to make it unique.

You clearly found glossary:places|> Places and Addresses but the Forum Posts on Places and Addresses at the bottom discuss the above and other topics, sometimes at great length.

There are ways to globally edit Place names to remove such as -England but there are gotchas.
The problems revolve around the FH usage of Place records whose unique key is the Place name.
If not careful, what seems to be a basic global edit actually creates a new Place record leaving the original Place record behind with any extra details such as photos recorded in it, but now not linked to anything.
If there are not too many, then it may be easier to manually edit each Place record name one by one.
Alternatively, there is a Search and Replace Plugin that with the appropriate settings will do the job you want.

Note that the one feature the 30-day FH Trial does not support is Plugins.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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BillH
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Re: Places and Addresses when importing from TMG

Post by BillH »

tatewise wrote: The solution either involves putting address & place details together as above for granular mapping, or adding some duplication from the Place into the Address to make it unique.
In this situation what I do is add enough information to the address so that I can tell the two addresses apart in the Tools > Work with Data > Address... list. By putting that information in double brackets [[...]], I don't end up with duplicate information in reports, the brackets prevent it from printing in reports. This can be especially helpful if I haven't got any street or street number address information yet.

Here are a couple of examples.

Evergreen Cemetery,,,, [[Walker, Minnesota]]
Evergreen Cemetery,,,, [[Paris, Texas]]
Evergreen Cemetery,,,, [[Everett, Washington]]

Saint Mary's,,,, [[Handsworth, England]]
Saint Mary's,,,, [[Birmingham, England]]

This way when I go to select an address I can tell them apart.
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Phil L
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Re: Places and Addresses when importing from TMG

Post by Phil L »

Thank you, Mike, for your welcome, and for your swift and very helpful reply.

I’m not familiar with geocoding, but had imagined that “smart” software would start from the rightmost place element, and then work left, successively narrowing down the location. But perhaps there’s more to it than that!

With your remarks about handing Place and Address data, and the threads under Forum Posts on Places and Addresses (thanks for alerting me to them), I now have a much better grip of these topics. There are clearly options, and I need to decide on the strategy that would suit me best, and then edit my data accordingly. If I do have geocoding issues, then it seems I can use Lat and Long to circumvent any anomalies.

For the likes of “-England”, I think I’ll simply edit occurrences individually as the need arises. In fact, I wasn’t particularly consistent in my use of them in TMG.

Thanks again, your help is much appreciated.
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Phil L
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Re: Places and Addresses when importing from TMG

Post by Phil L »

Thanks, Bill, your double-bracket idea looks very useful, especially, as you say, when the finer detail in an address is not available. I have a lot to learn about using fh!
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