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Bill Bienia’s RootsMagic 4 Tips Sheet:
That’s almost certainly because GEDCOM doesn’t really have a place for Place Details in the sense that RM uses Place Details. RM therefore places Place Details in the GEDCOM using the ADDR tag. It’s hard to fault RM for that.
Then TNG is processing the ADDR tag in RM’s GEDCOM precisely as the GEDCOM standard intends. TNG thinks your cemetery information is a standard postal address.
Another possibility is that there is another way RM could have placed its cemetery information into GEDCOM that would be more GEDCOM compliant. If so, perhaps a GEDCOM expert could chime in.
Two things are required: first you need to enable the Use Description Field option for any fact types where you wish to use the Description field in a sentence. Having done so, the [Desc] variable becomes available for sentences using that fact type. The variable is [Desc] rather than [Description] which won’t work.
For example, I have an Obituary fact type to display obituaries in narrative reports. I used to include obituary transcriptions as a part of the note for the Death fact, but I finally decided that having a separate fact type provided a lot of flexibility. For example, I can include or exclude Obituary facts from a narrative report without impacting the inclusion or exclusion of other notes in the same report.
My sentence template for the Obituary fact is as follows.
<b>Obituary:</b>< [Desc]>
It’s a two line template with the first line simply being an carriage return to force a new line. The template may look a little sparse, for example not having a [Date] variable or [Place] variable. You can certainly include [Date] and [Place] in the same template with [Desc]. But for this one, what I do is include newspaper or Web site information in the Description field and a transcription of the obituary in the Note field. RM includes notes by default rather than have a [Note] variable. For obituaries, I find it more flexible to include date and place information in the [Desc] field than in the [Date] and [Place] fields, and your mileage certainly may vary. I use the sort date for the Obituary fact to place it into the correct place in narrative reports.
You can see an example of my obituary fact at Sample RM Narrative Report Using Point Form Sentences If you scroll down the report a page or two, Alva Edward Peters had three obituaries in three different newspapers, with no two of the obituaries being the same.
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Marr794,
You are not the first person to note the shift of RM from actual genealogical research to downloading (and uploading) cr@p to online trees. That is why many power users are moving to other research-centered products.
There will always be a market for a product like RM, but it will be among the name collectors and not the serious researchers.
I guess I am still not really seeing what the problem is. If you like the place details as you show, it isn’t going to hurt anything to put them in your places.
Thank you Tom! This is just what I need.
I have done some of what you do, but not all. I generally use the name note for everything because I forget about notes in other places, especially when I am searching for something. And I am going to look over your report stuff very carefully. Thank you!
The problem is you end up with a long list of places. I like the idea of put details in a separate list as for one City you may have several detail locations: Hospital, Church, School, Cemetery.
It is also easier to determine you do not have duplicate places. It is only when you are working with facts that I like having the detail in front of the city.
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Sorry to come to this late, I’m new to RM and trying to get my head around place records. I hope it’s ok to revive old threads.
As a database developer in a previous life, the FTM approach seems a sensible and useful use of address data where you can use it to find all events in a given country, county or town - reliably and in a dynamic way (and efficiently from a data retrieval perspective which seems to be a problem for RM if the Find Everywhere search is as slow as people are reporting.)
I started to convert my place data into place details but I am not happy with the loss of data when exporting. To me the specific address information is important and useful information. When looking at records in London the exact address can be very useful. I have multiple census records where family members are in the house next door or one street along, and being able to see the clusters of addresses rather than just a parish has been useful in corroborating records.
I was also interested to know how people manage with place / place detail information when dealing with historical addresses?
Lots of my addresses are places that were in Middlesex and are stated as Middlesex on the records but are now part of Greater London. Some of them became part of the City of London 1889 and some later in 1965 with the creation of Greater London.
For example: Camden was formed from the metropolitan boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras. I was born in St Pancras but after 1965 so maybe I should say Camden, or maybe St Pancras (district), Camden (borough), London (city)? But I have records from there going back to early 1800s and they are definitely St Pancras, Middlesex.
It feels wrong to put Camden as the place these addresses from a historical POV and you lose a lot of the granularity of the address as Camden reaches from Cricklewood to Highgate in the north down to a few hundred metres of the Thames in the south.
I think there is a need for parish information to be recorded as part of the places not just the town name. I have records in St Albans for example and they show the parish in the records, one of 3 different parishes. Storing the parish name is useful from a research perspective as it should pinpoint parish records for that person and help find other family members too. I don’t know if this applies to St Albans but certainly for other areas there will be clusters of events around certain parishes in a town indicating that moving to a different parish was a significant event and that people were staying in a very small radius a lot of the time - consecutive census records on the same street but 3 doors down for example.
I feel a bit disappointed as better place management was something I had hoped for with RM but I still have a lot of getting used to so maybe I will work out something that is good for my data. I have a second tree with data from several ship’s captains so that is going to be a whole different type of location data! And I need to find out how Family Atlas fits into it all too.
Any pointers for things I need to consider would be appreciated 
I have also encountered this problem with the changing counties, boroughs, etc. in the UK. My approach is to enter what the name(s) were at the time of the event you are entering. I am now a resident of Canada, and in the period from 1867 to the present, there have been several changes in place names. Before 1867, the parts of the land area we now call Canada were either separate colonies Such as Nova Scotia, Upper Canada (mostly Ontario), Lower Canada (mostly Québec) and British Columbia, or grants to companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company (Rupert’s Land, which encompassed most of present-day Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the former Northwest Territories and Yukon Territory, as well as those parts of Present-day Ontario and Québec not included in the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. All of this was referred to as British North America. I only became Canada after Confederation in 1867. Not all of the present day provinces joined federation with their current names, but rather at varying times up to 1949, when the last province to join was Newfoundland (now called Newfoundland & Labrador).
My wife’s ancestors originally came from Scotland, and settled in Nova Scotia prior to Confederation, and therefore lived in Nova Scotia, British North America. Those born after July 1, 1867 were residents of Nova Scotia, Canada. Similarly, prior to migrating to Canada in 1957, I lived in Worcestershire, which became Hereford & Worcester and then West Midlands.
Documentation is important in these cases. Knowing where and event took place is not enough. One also needs to know when the event took place, so as to show the proper place name.
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