I am in the process of redoing a family that I have studied in the past, and
have started by examining the major lists in Legacy 9 before putting in any
new data. In particular I am trying to establish a consistent usage for all
the fields that I enter.
In this analysis, I note that I have often used "Location" as a synonym for
a real physical location, like the name of a church plus the political
entity wherein the church resides, or the actual address of a residence or
business, including the business name. Since I do have a lot of 20th century
urban people in this family, I have real street addresses for many events
like Census enumerations and WWI Draft Registrations. I even have a few
urban addresses in Irish cities in the mid-19th century, and I also need to
resolve the question of where to put the Townland in the more rural Irish
addresses.
My usage doesn't seem to be consistent with the way other people construct a
"Location." In particular there is only one such usage in the Sample Legacy
file; all the others equate the Location with the political entity. The
exception is Joshua Marsden Brown's Residence event, which has the Location
as 203 2nd Ave S, Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, United States. This
information also appears as an Event Address in the Sample file. On the
other hand, the column heading on the Event display is "Desc/Place/Notes",
which suggests some difference between "Location" and "Place," but I don't
see other references to "Place."
The "street address" usage does not appear at all in Geof Rassmussen's
unlocked2 file even though he is really concerned about who lives where. His
Location is always the containing political entity. He does not use the
Event Address to contain the street address of an event, but places that
information in the Notes of the Event.
My first thought was to define "Location" as the political entity in which
the Event occurred. This is consistent with the usage in Sample and
unlocked2. I would then place the address in the event's Description field,
but that seems inconsistent with the mapping function (I haven't checked
this). Then I thought about using the Event Address rather than the
Description field. That seems to be what the system designers had in mind
when the set up the Birth, Baptism, Death, and Burial events, which are
treated somewhat differently from all the other events. This is a tiny bit
awkward, because the Event Address field wants to know who or what occurs at
that address, which is not completely consistent with using it as the
Residence Event; If you leave this field blank, Legacy 9 supplies a somewhat
odd looking dummy. The Event Address in Sample solves the problem by saying
the name is "Home at 203 2d Ave S in Minneapolis Minnesota" and then
repeating the street address in the field called "Street." Both of these
solutions feel awkward to me.
Am I missing something genealogically important about the definition of
"Location"? Is this definition somehow connected with the way GEDCOM codes
things? Is that why the Birth, etc. Events are treated differently? If
GEDCOM or genealogy in general has a definition of "Location" as the
political entity containing the event, what is the correct method for
expressing the actual street address for an Event. Or should I just ignore
these problems and treat Location as best detailed expression of the
physical address?
I bet this has been discussed before on this list, and if anyone can tell me
where to look for a resolution of these questions, I would be happy to go
there.
Ben Woznick
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