Place styles functionality

[Jesper 0]

With the introduction of the error message when you try to override a place style in the Tag Entry screen, I frequently get reminded that I am trying to use TMG in a way, it seems not to be designed for. I am also beginning to wonder if this is really the best way to handle place styles.

 

The place style concept is a wonderful tool for merging 10 very different place elements into a meaningful place identifier and it is even more powerful for contextualizing the place information, i.e. presenting the place in different forms depending on the context.

 

I often use a full and rather long place name (including town, county, etc.) in the first tag and then I prefer not to repeat the same long place name over and over again in the following tags, but refer only refer to the town or maybe the house or dwelling. This much in line with the source notation: "Hereafter referred to as...".

 

I know I could use the [L1-10] variables to construct my own "place style" in the sentence structure, but the number of tags for each person differs and I definitively prefer to use standard sentence structures as much as possible.

 

I my opinion, a better way would be to have the place style attached to the tag and not to the master place list (MPL). As it is now, the place style is only used to format one occurrence of the place information, the MPL. If it was attached to the tag, I would give us the option to have all kinds of narrative references to the same place in MPL expressed in different ways. After all, the references may change, but the place remains the place.

 

Am I completely wrong in this? If not, would it be a useful addition to the wish list?

 

Jesper

[elevator 0]

Maybe I am understanding this a little wrong, but for me the current way seems to be logical. For example, I have a lot of ancestors from Norway, but I also have a lot of ancestors from the US. The setup is a little different for places there using Address, Township, Municipality, County and Country instead of the standard American format which is Address, City, County, State and Country. A style allows me to specify the field names for my Norwegian place names on a per place basis. Having the style on a per tag basis seems wrong and more tedious to me because the format of a place name tends to be uniform in a particular region. I can't see how it can be useful to have one tag with the placename formatted one way and another tag with the place name formatted another way.

 

Again, hope I didn't misunderstand you.

 

Ken.

 

I my opinion, a better way would be to have the place style attached to the tag and not to the master place list (MPL). As it is now, the place style is only used to format one occurrence of the place information, the MPL. If it was attached to the tag, I would give us the option to have all kinds of narrative references to the same place in MPL expressed in different ways. After all, the references may change, but the place remains the place.

 

Am I completely wrong in this? If not, would it be a useful addition to the wish list?

 

Jesper

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[GenerationGoneBy 0]

Actually you can define a Place style for each Tag type. Go to the master tag type list and on the general tag there is a place to select the Place style for that tag.

[RobinL 0]

Maybe I am understanding this a little wrong, but for me the current way seems to be logical. For example, I have a lot of ancestors from Norway, but I also have a lot of ancestors from the US. The setup is a little different for places there using Address, Township, Municipality, County and Country instead of the standard American format which is Address, City, County, State and Country. A style allows me to specify the field names for my Norwegian place names on a per place basis. Having the style on a per tag basis seems wrong and more tedious to me because the format of a place name tends to be uniform in a particular region. I can't see how it can be useful to have one tag with the placename formatted one way and another tag with the place name formatted another way.

 

Again, hope I didn't misunderstand you.

 

Ken.

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Ken,

 

I think that you have misunderstood the request made by Jesper. You are thinking about tags as setting the style for a tag type when I believe that the request is to be able to select the Place Style of this place record when used with this event tag of *this* person. That is, to be able to select which style applies to the place record when entering this event, just like you can now select which *Name-Var* should be used when creating output for this person in a report.

 

I see that this request makes a lot of sense. It would allow the output to have much more flexibility.

 

Allowing this would still not allow me to do what I would like to do. To be able to record the place as it was described on the source record and yet get that place record associated with my preferred (primary) name for that place. I would like to see a scheme for places that paralleled the Name-Var of Names. Then it would possible to record, cite the source of that equivalence and search for places that are the same but recorded differently. This came about because of language, culture, politics, or use of a different geograghic heirarchy. This feature has more relevelance to the UK and Europe place records than to the US, but is probably of interest to persons with US colonal records of places that evolved as boundaries changed.

 

Another comment here about place output using styles:

It is desirable that the second and subsequent uses of that place name may be kept short while maintaining good language usage in the sentence or other output (VCF). So this may require a several selectable report output templates for a place style for second or subsequent use. The current, common for all styles, short place name template does not provide this flexibility. While the re-entry required for individual short place names increases the load on the user.

 

Are these important issues in your use of place styles?

[Jesper 0]

Ken,

 

I think that you have misunderstood the request made by Jesper. You are thinking about tags as setting the style for a tag type when I believe that the request is to be able to select the Place Style of this place record when used with this event tag of *this* person. That is, to be able to select which style applies to the place record when entering this event, just like you can now select which *Name-Var* should be used when creating output for this person in a report.

 

I see that this request makes a lot of sense. It would allow the output to have much more flexibility.

 

Allowing this would still not allow me to do what I would like to do. To be able to record the place as it was described on the source record and yet get that place record associated with my preferred (primary) name for that place. I would like to see a scheme for places that paralleled the Name-Var of Names. Then it would possible to record, cite the source of that equivalence and search for places that are the same but recorded differently. This came about because of language, culture, politics, or use of a different geograghic heirarchy. This feature has more relevelance to the UK and Europe place records than to the US, but is probably of interest to persons with US colonal records of places that evolved as boundaries changed.

 

Another comment here about place output using styles:

It is desirable that the second and subsequent uses of that place name may be kept short while maintaining good language usage in the sentence or other output (VCF). So this may require a several selectable report output templates for a place style for second or subsequent use. The current, common for all styles, short place name template does not provide this flexibility. While the re-entry required for individual short place names increases the load on the user.

 

Are these important issues in your use of place styles?

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Robin and Ken

You are right, Robin. This is what I meant. Good language is important to me in narrative reports, and it is difficult enough, to maintain a sense of natural language style. The use of alternative Place Style for the same place would help a lot and still maintain data persistence in the MPL.

 

I personally don't have a lot of places that change name over the years, set aside trivial spelling variations. It seems to be more stable than person names. But I see you point. It will not automatically be solved with the extended use of Place Styles, but maybe there would be a work around. If there were Place Styles attached to tags, you could put the alternative name in say L10 and then have two Place Styles for that one place. One would use the normal name and the other would use the alternative name. This would be OK as long as the alternative name was confined to one maybe two elements of the place description. But I guess this would cover most cases, wouldn't it?

 

Thanks for all you comments.

 

Jesper

[elevator 0]

I may have been a bit fast on the trigger there. After going into the program, I see that your comment does indeed make sense as explained.

 

Robin and Ken

You are right, Robin. This is what I meant. Good language is important to me in narrative reports, and it is difficult enough, to maintain a sense of natural language style. The use of alternative Place Style for the same place would help a lot and still maintain data persistence in the MPL.

 

I personally don't have a lot of places that change name over the years, set aside trivial spelling variations. It seems to be more stable than person names. But I see you point. It will not automatically be solved with the extended use of Place Styles, but maybe there would be a work around. If there were Place Styles attached to tags, you could put the alternative name in say L10 and then have two Place Styles for that one place. One would use the normal name and the other would use the alternative name. This would be OK as long as the alternative name was confined to one maybe two elements of the place description. But I guess this would cover most cases, wouldn't it?

 

Thanks for all you comments.

 

Jesper

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[Pierce.Reid 0]

I personally don't have a lot of places that change name over the years, set aside trivial spelling variations. It seems to be more stable than person names. ...

 

Jesper

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I would guess that most places we refer to have changed their names over time. The only way we can avoid it is if we don't go back very far in time or if our ancestors did not stay in one place long enough to experience a change of name.

 

The original British colonies developed over time, dividing when population or other factors caused a change, colonies became states, some states divided, Indian Territory got specific names which eventually became states, states were subdivided into counties, which often split into two or more, territories were acquired from other countries and then subdivided, some cities grew and took over their "suburbs", etc., etc. And that's just in the US.

 

In some parts of Europe, it can be a real mess, with borders being moved around, countries being created and destroyed, and records, where they survive, possibly moving to outside the current country.

 

In recording our place names, we should try to be as accurate as possible. In some cases the record may specify just the city, but we know which county that city was in at that time, so we can record it. If we just know the county, we may suspect that the event occurred in a city, but we can't record that because it was not in the record. If we are not sure of the time of an event in a particular town, we may find that during the period of uncertainty, the town mentioned change the county it was in, so we should just record the town and state/colony, without implying we know the county. So the quality of our original data may dictate that we have several versions of the name of one place.

 

I tend to create a new place record for each variation of a place, as recorded in my source. If I know enough about the place, I may add additional place detail. If I get a more complete place name for an event, I may select the more complete name from my place table. But I don't think you should standardize your place names to the extent that you add place detail that may have been incorrect at the time of the event.

 

Pierce