For example (for my own files which is 95% United States research), I may have " , Decatur County, GA, USA" as the long name and "Decatur County, GA" as the short name. With cemeteries, I use "Bainbridge - Oak City Cemetery, Decatur County, GA, USA" as long and "Bainbridge, Decatur County, GA - Oak City Cemetery" as short.
I grappled with whether or not to spell out state names and decided that most people wanting to see my particular data would do a web search using the 2 letter abbreviation so I kept it. However, I did decide to use the word "county" in the description because often a town and a county in the state have the same name, which can be confusing. Then, of course, there are some towns in VA (and maybe elsewhere) that are not within a county.
I guess my point is the short location allows the user to customise the location field to make it readable, while the long location makes it convenient for easy sorting. It's the best of both worlds! Thanks Legacy!
Gail Nestor Smyrna, GA http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~nestorgenealogy/
----- Original Message ----- From: "Rob Weiss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 6:32 AM
Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] The Locations Hierarchy
Jennie, I agree basically with Cathy's comments about commas, and should clarify my statement above about adding commas for missing elements. I only insert intermediate commas for a location in a country where I would normally have, say a county, and don't know in a particular case which county the town is in. So I'd have "Somewhere,,England" and then when I find it is in Devonshire it would become "Somewhere, Devonshire, England". I use this to remind me to sort out which "Somewhere" it is. It can also help when sorting in odd ways to look for duplicates, or for finding all the locations in county X.
However, it's generally more important to have reports looking good, and that means either using in reports short location names which you've entered omitting the intermediate commas, or always omitting them in the long location names.
Rob
On 4/21/05, Cathy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Jennie,
You simply need to add locations from smallest to largest if you always end
with the country and then sort the location list from right to left - and
the countries sort alphabetically whether you have 3 or 4 or 6 or 9
location fields.
Extra commas for non-existent fields, just to get your database to line up,
are misleading in reports. You can remove extra leading commas but not
internal commas.
Cheers, Cathy
At 03:18 21/04/2005, you wrote:
>Another thought on the locations hierarchy and how it >should be used, especially considering users who have >relatives/ancestors in several countries. > >Why do we as genealogists need hierarchies? We need >to know geographic and political subdivisions, to >locate places, on maps and in person. And to search >in the correct jurisdiction for records, especially >vital records. And probably other reasons, too. > >The Legacy default is US-oriented: city, county, >state, country. I bet that most of us, especially if >we don't have very many relatives or ancestors abroad, >don't fill in the country. ><snip> >I have a little knowledge of Ireland. I have been >putting a comma to separate the first field, the town >name in the second, the county in the third, and >Ireland in the fourth. That's just the way it >happened. I could have put town in the first, county >in the second, left the third one blank, and Ireland >in the fourth. In fact, I think that I will go back >and do that. > >Either way, Ireland sorts with USA, which is what I >intended. > >Hope this helps . . . > >Jennie
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