For research and reporting purposes it is important to know the time periods a particular place or place detail was valid. County check does part of this already, but there is no facility to add start and end dates to specific places and place details to improve data entry and validation.
Users should have the ability to enter a start and end date for a place or place detail, i.e. town was incorporated in mm/dd/yy or house was built in mm/dd/yy and demolished mm/dd/yy. When entering an event with a place or place detail outside of the range a warning should be giving similar to County Check.
In RM7, I use the Place Notes to record dates like settlement, incorporation, etc. These Place Notes are visible in the Place List while selecting. It doesn’t provide any automatic feedback, but it also never argues with me like County Check does.
True, and I’m using place notes for historical information that I haven’t yet figured out how to incorporate into reporting. That said, what I REALLY want is that township X existed from X to Y and to warn me when that’s used outside of that. Of course I’d like the error reports to include that also. If I don’t want to be pestered about X place or place detail I simply don’t put a start or end date there.
I should note I’m still using RM7 but I don’t expect the the feature to be added to RM7, but to be catnip to entice me to RM8.
I should note (and I guess I need to put in the request too) that another thing I’d like to use the Place Notes for is to have a “place report” I could include in publisher (which also isn’t in RM8 yet).