Census citations: How to enter Census Place

IzzardResearcher · Post by **IzzardResearcher** » 18 Oct 2006 19:12

Hello

I've just started using Gedcom Census and wondering how best to enter the Census Place.

For example, an census entry I have for 1851 is noted as being in:

(1) Parish of Hackney
(2) Parliamentary Borough of Tower Hamlets
(3) Ecclesiastical District of Dalston

One option I've considered is to enter all of them in the Census Place field in (hopefully the correct) order of magnitude - 'Dalston, Hackney, Tower Hamlets'.

All the information is potentially useful for trying to locate the whereabouts of ancestors so it would seem a shame to ignore part of it.

Anyone any suggestions or recommendations on how to handle this situation please?

Many thanks.

Lindsey

ID:1930

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 18 Oct 2006 19:18

Personally I always enter places in the
village/area/county,country

So
Hackney,London,England

For areas in Liverpool (which I know the county for
Kirkby, Liverpool, Lancashire, England.

I have bought a copy of 'map my family' tree and it does not like the city in the names, but I feel they are of use.

I try and keep all my Places the same what ever their source. So a census/marriage/death would all be entered the same in the place and additional information in the address.

IzzardResearcher · Post by **IzzardResearcher** » 19 Oct 2006 09:37

Jane

Thank you for your method. I think that's a good way of noting location because, as you say, it uses consistent locations; makes it much easier to see where family members lived regionally.

Regards

Lindsey

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 19 Oct 2006 11:03

Generally we haven't done it, but I can see the point for keeping all the extra information from the top of the census forms somewhere... like Jane, our Places are 'Town/Village, County, Country' for consistency as much as anything (you don't always get places from censuses, and it's nice if they look the same regardless). We record censuses as sources, and it's tempting to add the other district information as 'Where within source'

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 19 Oct 2006 12:03

A further passing thought... cities, towns, parishes, bouroughs, districts (enumeration, ecclesiastical, registration, etc) are not all geographically hierarchical... There may be no correct order of magnitude.

IzzardResearcher · Post by **IzzardResearcher** » 20 Oct 2006 18:38

Thanks Chris, I hadn't considered that there may not be an order of magnitude with the different 'places' on the census forms. I've gone with your and Jane's suggestion of village/town/city, county, country and then add the other information such as ecclesiastical district as a note against the source.

Many thanks.

Regards

Lindsey

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 21 Oct 2006 05:15

There's an item on the wish list that you might like to go and vote for to be able to add information to places, so you don't have to put it in the notes for every individual.

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 21 Oct 2006 05:29

P.S. Just to make life complicated, even 'town/village, county' is not always strictly hierarchical... we have a few examples where a village is split by a county boundary, and at least one family all from the same village but born in 2 different counties. Then there's the places that have changed county in the course of history... it seems misleading to say she was born in Holwell, Bedfordshire but married in Holwell, Hertfordshire, but it's true... how do ther people deal with this?

Tombaston · Post by **Tombaston** » 21 Oct 2006 09:37

I use the county name at the time of the event so I have a relative born in Wordsley, Staffordshire but her children were born in Wordsley, West Midlands. Although London is a pain with paces swapping in and out of Middlesex, London, Surrey and Essex at various censuses.

Another scenario is where the postal address is different from the geographical address. For instance when I was twelve we moved to a village in Berkshire with a postal address in Wiltshire. One week later it moved into Oxfordshire but the postal address stayed in Wiltshire. In this case I ignore the postal address and use the physical county at the time of the event.

I must admit although I use the village/town/city, county, country approach I don't bother putting a country unless it isn't England. This is due to over 95% of the individuals in my tree being in England with only a handful of emigrants where I now correspond with their descendants. I guess this is laziness on my part and will cause problems to one of my non English relatives when I share data with them so eventually I will rectify this.

I have another question, how to cope with places in countries like the USA where you have town, county, state and country? Do you just drop the county, I suspect there may be town names where they occur more than once in the same state?

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 21 Oct 2006 09:56

Dave on the subject of countries, I have been having this problem from the other end. I recently bought a copy of Map My Family Tree mainly to sort out my place names. What was highlighted were the number of places which could be anywhere, I have had to make assumptions based on other data. So for instance someone born in Birmingham, is that England or Alabama?

I also found a lot of data from other people imported before I knew better which had a place of St Mary's Church. No a lot of help to me to work out where the church was! So my feeling is put the country in.

Tombaston · Post by **Tombaston** » 21 Oct 2006 10:14

I agree I need to put countries in, I have relatives in both London and Bradford (both in Ontario, Canada not England). It was a left over from my early days of entering data when I hadn't thought about how my data could be interpreted by others. It now ranks along with changing over to one source per census item; something I want to do but will require a lot of tedious effort to sort out.

If I thought about it I could probably create a macro in Word to do it or even do find and replace to put England on every place then go back and remove from other countries, which is less work than to add to those that need it.

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 21 Oct 2006 10:19

Dave, I think there's a wish list item for find and replace in FH

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 28 Nov 2006 09:36

I've just finished a tool to help with place names... see my post in the General forum

stewartrb · Post by **stewartrb** » 11 Jan 2013 14:59

Tombaston said:
I have another question, how to cope with places in countries like the USA where you have town, county, state and country? Do you just drop the county, I suspect there may be town names where they occur more than once in the same state?

You will find that most all genealogy data collections are centered around the counties. (Much like the U.K..) The county is the second to last thing you'd want to drop in a U.S. place entry after state.

New York, New York; Boston, Mass., San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. Some places are so well known you could get away with dropping the county and people will know where you mean.

There's only one Boston in Massachusetts, but least 10 across the U.S.. And Los Angeles now spans five counties.

And if you go looking for records on-line in those places, be prepared to know the county.

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