When I started genealogy many decades ago, in my naivety I omitted the country name from places where they were in the UK. However the wisdom of experience has shown I now need to add the country to them. RM10 has a facility which seems to do so within Place Clean (Add or remove country), but neither the Help Function not the published guide are particularly explicit as to how it actually should work. Can anyone advise how I can add UK to all my places except those with USA, Canada, Australia etc explicitly included already? Will this function do what I want it to do?
1 Like
Search & Replace (under Places).
Make a Backup, then I would Sort the places by Reverse Places so that you can see them grouped better (up to you).
Pick a location and put the name and add “, UK”
Probably will need to make multiple passes.
1 Like
Since you’re going to be adding country names, do you have any situations prior to 1707, from between 1707 and 1800 and after 1922?
If you do, then for historical accuracy, you might have to factor in changing country names. As a UK citizen, I’m sure you already know. But for benefit of anyone else who has ancestry in that region (including me):
- 1707 … Acts of Union that united the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland, forming “Great Britain”
- 1800 … Acts of Union that created the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- 1922 … name change to Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, after the partitioning of Ireland
I, for example, have ancestors that came from County Leitrim in 1822, so technically their emmigration event should read that they came from “Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”.
I also have Scotish ancestors with the name Bruce. But I don’t yet know when that line came to the United States. So while the line undoubtedly came from the Kingdom of Scotland, the as-yet-unidentified immigrant may have originated from “Great Britain”.
1 Like
Thanks MadDog. That was one solution I thought of, but I was wondering if there was a more elegant solution than carrying out 40 or 50 separate passes. It would be neat if there was a way of transferring the Standard Place Name instead.
1 Like
I should be so lucky! No, it’s just the boring old UK that I want to append to all the non-UK places.
From where I am, the UK present-day or otherwise, is far from boring 
. According to DNA the majority of my ancestors come from there, and I look forward to connecting them so I can learn more about where they come from!
You don’t mention that you’ve ~tried~ Place Clean. Some familiarity would come with such an endeavor.
Maybe using File>Tools>Copy and name it LearningPlaceClean.rmtree or performing a Backup of your working database (that could be restored to avoid any changes)… then running the Tool would lessen the confusion or raise further questions.
I was hoping someone could explain to me how it works before I tried it, but I have now had a go on a test db and the results are…mixed.
The PlaceClean of countries indeed leave any places with countries already alone as I’d hoped (hurrah!) and appended “United Kingdom” to the rest - well most of them. For some inexplicable reason, a whole bunch of places (about 10%) were left untouched. A second pass of the PlaceClean tool still left these unchanged. I can see no reason whatsoever for omitting them, there doesn’t seem to be anything odd about them at all..
What about Geocoding your database (Tools–Place Tools-Geocode all places in the database)?
Unfortunately, what this does is try to match all my place descriptions within the RM gazetteer and produce co-ordinates for them (i.e. geocoding), whilst storing the standard description (which is what I actually want) in “standard”. It’s so frustrating!
Personally I don’t trust the Geocode All Places function. In a test I ran, it geocoded two separate places the exact same, despite them being distinctly and distantly apart in the same city.
Besides, for mapping purposes I use the far more capable Google Earth Pro. With that I can place pins, add notes to those pins that include embedded URLs, load in GIS shapefiles for vector-based polygon boundaries (including those from the US Census Bureau), add in historical map overlays such as those from David Rumsey’s geo-referenced collection and past census enumeration maps, and so forth.
It sounds like the PlaceClean gets you a fair distance down the road. You might have to just “brute force” the remainders.
Can you give some examples of what didn’t have United Kingdom appended? Did they already have 4 place levels?
Certainly Rene.
For completeness, this is what I did: in PlaceClean I selected “Add this country to places” and put “England, United Kingdom” in the Country. I then confirmed all the places for cleaning.
The following are a few of those didn’t have country attached afterwards:
Berkshire, Hagbourne
Cheshire, Prestwich
Co Durham, Hesleton
Essex, Waltham Forest
But these, for example, DID have “United Kingdom, England” added after the clean:
Berkshire, Bray
Cheshire, Wirral
Co Durham, Billingham
Essex, Brentwood
Hope this helps.
I’ve taken a quick look
Hagbourne does not exist, there is a East Hagbourne and a West Hagbourne (But no Hagbourne) Also since 1974 it is in Oxfordshire
Prestwich is currently in Greater Manchester (Not Cheshire)
Hesleton does not exist..Do you mean Heselton?
Dave
It will look at current place names for suggestions. There could also be an issue with using two place names for the country.
The Gazetteer option of RootsMagic does list the following:
-Berkshire, (West -or- East) Hagbourne
-Lancashire, Prestwich
-Co Durham, (Cold Hesledon) (also curated as Cold Hesleton)
But not this:
-Waltham Forest appears to have encompassed parts of areas like Chingford, Leyton, and Walthamstow,
I think I’ve cracked it. The PlaceClean ONLY adds the country to place names if it finds it explicitly in the Gazetteer, even though the place might be correctly described in the Standard field.
This seems to be the case in most of the instances I’ve found, though I can’t see what’s wrong with Windsor, Berkshire. It’s actually a good way of identifying errors in the place database. Looks like I’ve got some tidying up to do.
Not wrong, but another duality in Old Windsor vs New Windsor
I’m UK based too, and I’m just wondering why everyone seems to think it’s prefereable to add “UK”, “United Kingdom”, “Britain” or whatever to all domestic placenames. I don’t bother, it doesn’t seem at all necessary to me. What I do is add country names to places outside the UK so, for example the English city of Birmingham is just plain old Birmingham, West Midlands but Birmingham, Alabama has US added to it. I’m curious, can someone explain please?
1 Like
Including the country will help with hinting results