I have asked about this prior to RM 8 release, but have seen little discussion about the problems.
I want to save the locations of family related features that might be lost to future generations. That means I must save in a form that will make sense in many decades time. To me Latitude and longitude seems the best way to save location.
My 1st issue is that RM8 uses a list of known feature locations (towns, cemeteries, etc), but it does not offer lat & long fields that I can fill in. That’s not much use if I want to record Aunt Mary’s grave site in Rookwood cemetery (286 Ha or ~700 acres, 3/4 m+ graves). If I am recording building’s location I want 3m accuracy, for a grave I want 1m (and problem 2 is that currently mobile phones only give location within 3 to 10m depending on a number of factors - hopefully greater accuracy will be available soon).
I can enter location in a general notes field of RM8, but that’s not as useful as dedicated fields. I want to record the locations of a dozen graves in Rookwood, so just editing the co-ordinates for Rookwood cemetery won’t solve the problem, I want to enter different co-ordinates for each section, row and grave number.
Problem 3 is that the Australian tectonic plate is moving faster than most other plates, ~6cm/annum. In the year 2120 a grave will be ~6m from its current location. So the database needs a field for date of measurement if the gr grandchildren are going to be able to locate it after surface signs of it have disappeared.
So my questions are:
Q1) how does everyone else handle this issue in the current version of RM8?
Q2) will location fields be included in the next version of RM?