Historic localities

RootsMagic
,
1

Since quite some time I am trying to embedd localities into their historical context:

And doing so, I surf along the limits of what RM is capable of doing. Therefore a few suggestions:

  • it would be great to have an additional field to contain the original information gleaned from some document. Often this is just a village name in some more/less recognizable spelling. The way things are now, this original information is being overwritten by every attempt to make a locality more readable, and thus it becomes practically impossible to become aware of errors.

  • to put localitie into their historical context one needs to add an information from when to when this context is valid, i.e.
    Görmin, Amt Loitz, Hzm. Pommern (unter schwed. Krone), HRR-Lehen (1648‑10‑24 – 1806‑06‑27)
    Görmin, Här. Grimmen, Svenska Pommern, Sverige (fr. Besatzung) (1807-10-29 - 1810-01-29)
    Görmin, Kr. Grimmen, Prov. Pommern, Kgr. Preußen, Deutscher Bund (1818‑10‑01 – 1866-08-23)
    Görmin, Kr. Demmin, Prov. Pommern, Kgr. Preußen, Norddeutscher Bund (1867‑07‑01 – 1870‑12‑31)
    Görmin, Kr. Demmin, Prov. Pommern, Kgr. Preußen, Deutsches Kaiserreich (1871-01-01 – 1918-11-09)
    Görmin, Kr. Demmin, Prov. Pommern, FS Preußen, Deutsches Reich (WR) (1919‑08‑11 – 1933‑01‑29)
    Görmin, Kr. Demmin, Prov. Pommern, FS Preußen, Deutsches Reich (NS) (1938‑10‑01 – 1945‑05‑08)
    to just mention a few examples.
    Presently there is no such field under “Places” and it is not possible to sort within any given locality according to such dates

  • localities are embedded into a hierarchy of administrative structures. In a given period such a structure encompasses plenty of localities, i.e.
    Derschow, Amt Greifswald, Hzm. Pommern (unter schwed. Krone), HRR-Lehen (1648‑10‑24 – 1806‑06‑27)
    Dersekow, Amt Greifswald, Hzm. Pommern (unter schwed. Krone), HRR-Lehen (1648‑10‑24 – 1806‑06‑27)
    Groß Bisdorf, Amt Greifswald, Hzm. Pommern (unter schwed. Krone), HRR-Lehen (1648‑10‑24 – 1806‑06‑27)
    Ladebow, Amt Greifswald, Hzm. Pommern (unter schwed. Krone), HRR‑Lehen (1648‑10‑24 – 1806‑06‑27)
    Wouldn’t it be possible to organize Localities in hierarchies? I know, this isn’t exactly where RM comes from, but it’s a relational database, isn’t it? And it seems to me that this will become more and more relevant, so why not trail-blaze such a functionality?

2

There is a note field that you can put detailed information on the location. I recorded when counties or place names changed. The Name field is used in geocoding. Enter the current name for it to be found first. It will fill in the Standard place name with the geocode. Then edit the name to show the historical name. That way the Standard field will remain the current place name and the Name field is the historical place name.

3

Thanks, but this doesn’t even do half the work. The administrative embedding of place names changes frequently in Germany - as I showed above. So I need to place the information about the validity period somewhere. I can put it into the note, but then, the note is often used for really individual additional information. I can place it in ‘Abbrev’ even though it does not belong there, but I don’t use this field otherwise. Both options are not really good, because the information from when to when a certain locality-identification-string has been valid needs to appear with each and every such string. It therefore definitely deserves an own field. Now, when I enter the locality ‘Görmin’ for example and I look for suggestions. I get more than a dozend suggestions which are alphabetically sorted - not chronologically. This is anything but convenient - and it blocks fields from being used as intended.

4

Confirming request has been reported to development.