If jr's method re locations came in and I had to put bits of locations in different fields, I'd think of looking for another program and be in a real dilemma.
There is no current dilemma with locations apart from the fact that Legacy assigns "level 1" to the first piece instead of to the last piece in a location string. Assigning it to the last means that in effect what jr is proposing, already happens. (so perhaps it could all happen hidden in the background) Some locations are town, county, state, country. Others are town, county, country.
Within a particular country (or part of a country) this will be consistent. Number from the end and all sorts of useful sorting is possible. It's only laziness that says that the current right to left sort of locations could be usefully improved. But the Legacy team are good at providing things to save us typing :-)
The only other dilemma is caused by people who want to force all locations into four fields. That, I believe, is mainly a US problem caused by towns and counties and possibly townships having the same names so it is not obvious which level is meant, even for the knowledgeable. There is a little confusion in England between some county "capital" towns and the county but it is usually obvious which is meant.
Cheers, Cathy
At 05:13 19/12/2004, you wrote:
At 09:49 AM 12/18/2004, John R. Bayle wrote:[snip] If Legacy (or any other gen program) adopted the scheme I have suggested for identifying places by assigning a "type" tag with each place, then the the program doesn't have to "get too smart in trying to decipher which bits of the text string are which!" Each "bit" will be defined as a City, State, County, Province or whatever. In order to write out a report, we only need to assign each type to a level. So for example, when the program sees an address it knows that's Level 1 and that when it sees a City that's Level 2 etc. One could have multiple government entities at the same level, so State and Province could both be Level 3 so that US States and Canadian Provinces would print just before the country.
jrI would like to add a vote for John's proposed method of handling locations.
I don't see another good way to resolve the location dilemma.
In addition, those who are working on a possible future GEDCOM version are using this approach.
Dean L. Bennett
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