Location Names: Balance between Historical Accuracy and Genealogical Meaningfulness

There are hundreds of existing cemetery projects. In effect, they are all about locations too. Following this proposed concept, I suggest that the contributors of the cemetery projects add a Toponymy section, similar to the one posted in the Detroit project, where recommended values for the «Place» (address), «City», «County», «State/Province» and «Country» fields are indicated, per time period.

Cemetery location names do change over time, say, because of town merging/splitting. They get assigned new/different street addresses.

Also, cemeteries are sometimes actually moved physically, say, due to rezoning or because their location will be flooded (e.g. nearby lake water level raising as part of building a hydroelectic reservoir).

Therefore, having recommended values for the cemetery location by time period could help Geni users enter meaningful values for burial place.

morel

Thank you for these suggestions, morel. Indeed i am faced with "the location dilemma" as I track my family's movements. Particularly in new territory, they stayed - but counties evolved around them.

As a side note, I find myself using a topographic, much as earlier genealogists did, in the display name. This is particularly useful when someone happened to be born one place, died another, yet resided and "is best known" of yet a different place. So in your example, if I were faced with multiple "same name" Marie-Archange Campau's, i would add

Marie-Archange Campau, of Detroit

(or probably better in French to suit language used at this time & place)

I also am encountering the location dilemma with my family. They are all from Poland. Documents that I find claim members of my family were born in Austria, some claim Germany, but in my family's folklore and heart, they were born in Poland. Currently I put Poland in the place of birth, which is accurate culturally but not geopolitically. I'm not sure how to resolve this dilemma.

Hi Noelle

I have the same problem. :)

I use the name "as it was historically" for birth and death and use the cemetery location for "current" location. If you dont know the cemetery you could fill it on something like

(place) an unknown burial place in or near to
(city, province, country)

Then we've pleased all masters!

You have two issues to solve: A location that can be located on a map of today, hopefully automatically by applications that use those values, and documenting what the sources tell.

For the location fields I try to use current names if possible, but when quoting sources I quote what the sources tell with an explanation on what it can be mapped to today.

Erica Howton That is what I try to do also. Even SmartCopy wants to use modern names, so they have to be edited.

What I've encountered for US is that the "former" name of the county might be where the records are held. So to track down wills, or look up marriage books, or land plats, for example, local historians are meticulous in demanding the location precision as it was originally.

In JewishGen for Europe they have developed a mapping database, so if you look for the location as it is now, it can be cross referenced to (say) the 1880s, and the current archive holding repository be identified.

Now I'm not sure if a similar strategy has been developed for non Jewish records in Poland (Ukraine, etc), so for that specific our Polish curators may be of help.

Many times I use current name, followed by the 1-2 names in different languages - utilized at the time in documents, etc. ex: Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony)

Bratislava (capital of Slovakia) was part of the "Austrian Hungarian empire" - thus Pressburg (in German) and Pozsony (in Hungarian) were also used.

ps. I have a close relative who for years thought her ancestors came from Hungary (the empire) - when actually they came from current Slovakia - where the Archives were.

Here is another project (with associated subprojects) with help with location names per time period for the South of France:

https://www.geni.com/projects/Provinces-d-Occitanie/3483

Peter - don't get me started on that. One side is from Odessa, which was Russia at immigration. We only figured out it's now Ukraine a few years ago (behind the times). Then we learned it was actually, the generation before, from Pinsk. Which is now (again) Belarus. So I'm not sure what I should call my origins!

Our Estonian curators are born un USSR, should we insist that they write that on their profile?

I don't insist on anything. I think locations are for the convenience of the researchers, first & foremost.

Agree with Erica, it's more work for me to write Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony). The only reason I do it - is because some users do Not know the 3 names = same city (not in Austria or Hungary) - and it is Slovakia that will have any records.

Maybe Putin can give us a perspective:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

As of now (11OCT15) his profile shows conflicting info for place of birth. I don't know, maybe my counterintelligence backgroud is biasing me, still, you tell me, if you were to tell Vlad in person that his place of birth is NOT USSR, I don't know, I'd like to see his eyes looking at you.

The point is that this project concept is for Geni users/curators to create a project for a location, and to agree together on a meaningful breakdown of time periods.

Take Arthabaska, Québec, where a famous Canada Prime Minister launched his career:

https://www.geni.com/projects/Arthabaska-Qu%C3%A9bec-Canada/24494

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada

The toponymy section shows simply and clearly meaningful value for different location names in different time periods.

Thanks to this meaningful breakdown, we now know that our beloved Wilfred Laurier practiced law in "Arthabaskaville" and not "Saint-Christophe-d'Arthabaska". The distinction is important for the people in this region and it adds coulors and cultural context to the profile.

Going back to Vladimir Putin, to put his country of birth as "Russian Federation" is a mistake. Putin is a born Soviet in every fiber of is body.

Proposed way forward:

1) In profiles, let's use contextual and cultural meaningful location names that are meaningful to a profile at that time.

2) let's have a project per location, where Geni users and curators can debate and eventually agree on a meaningful breakdown of names for a given location.

3) Let's keep the breakdown simple enough so that every Geni user can easily understand it and apply it in the profiles they manage for their family.

3)a) See the Arthabaska example. It is clear and everyone can apply it.

4) Because each location is a project, then any Geni user can start a discussion to propose improvement in the breakdown. Discussions are is the cornerstone of collaboration.

5) Any exception to the accepted breakdown can be writen into the profile's "About" section.

5)a) We should avoid very hard to insert name variations into location fields. Take Putin again: to have place name as "Leningrad USSR" and country as "Russian Federation" is just nonsense. Remember that there are many Geni users who work hard to print their family tree very nicely on paper. But darn it looks ugly on a printed family tree when all sorts of exceptions are shown. Can we do our best to avoid this please?

I do the hardest to list correct names as per the time period that the event has happened.

I know that there are some people who believe that we should use current names, but think about this. Right now Russia has annexed Crimea, should we then change all the places of birth for all the people born in Ukraine?

What if tomorrow Russia annexes the place you were born in, would you then consider yourself to have been born in Russian Federation??? Of course not.

I fill in the historically accurate place names, until I get to the Country field - where I fill in the modern country, so that research apps can locate the profile geographically.

Sharon Doubell, the guideline you propose may work at times, but not in others. This is quite a tricky question. There may be no definitive answer.

Ideally--and perhaps one day--profiles will have both the historical and current locations.

Still, a problem with using today's country name is the frequent changes in souverain state names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_date_of_f...

There seems to be in average a dozen or so changing every decade. As illustrated by Volodya Mozhenkov's example, trying to keep current locations up-to-date can get tedious, voire absurde.

But the other side of the coin is that, it can quickly get counterproductive to seek to be too accurate. Like a profile born during the Ancien Régime in the Flandres, trying to pinpoint "what country precisely was born this profile, in the city of Gent, precisely in 1707?

https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000033813554610

About it, Panckoucke's « Encyclopédie Géographique » of the time says that Gent changed possession in 1678, 1706, 1708, 1708 again and 1745 between Spain, France, the Marlborough Duchy, France again, Marlborough again, and France again. Trying to be too accurate can also get tedious, voire absurde.

Ultimately, in Geni, we do genealogy, not history per say. Therefore, I think we want a good balance between accuracy and meaningfulness, while keeping genealogy practical and fun.

In this sense, perhaps it is better to make Gent as part of Belgium (where it is today). But on the other end, I would prefer to see that Vladimir Putin was born in the USSR, not in the Russian Federation. Case in point, when asked, he answers that he is a soviet born.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

The timeline on profiles are helpful aid...using the historical location is best and researcher may edit to add additional notes such as name changes.

Genealogy requires learning about migration patterns, boundary changes, and name changes of locales...it's would be more genealogically confusing to use current boundaries/names

I think that the (almost) perfect solution would be:
* Location name as it were at the time of event
* Geolocation pointing to the exact place on the globe where that place is

From Geolocation it would be trivial to generate the current location at the time of somebody viewing the event.

Of course, that can still generate problems. Let's say we have a person getting hired for some position in Yugoslavia and then is still working there in Croatia. The event is continuous, it would make no sense to cut the employment into 2 pieces because the political geography changed.

I have many such things in my tree due to the USSR splitting up. I generally try to lean towards putting the place as it were in the beginning of the event, unless the event is more than 2/3 in the latter period.

For example, somebody has started the university in 1988 and has finished in 1992, i would put USSR (it split apart in 1991), but if a person has started in 1990 and finished in 1995, i would put Russia.

Morel, we' ll have to agree to disagree on this one.

I don't recognize the USSR as a country. It was a political co-operative containing at it's peak 35 actual states (countries) with their own history, customs, culture, and language. The USSR was actually landless and without any of these things.The Soviet Union was not founded until 28 December 1922 and yet I see so many records claiming USSR in genealogy up to 150 years before it's formation.