Thoughts on having a "Places Lived" field on Wikitree profiles?

Question

Just brainstorming - I tend to have situations often occur in my research where I know where someone lived, but don't know a birth date or death date.  In any case, was wondering if anyone thought that it might have value to have a "places lived" field in the profiles?  I can see it might not be supereasy to create since some people might have lived in 20 places, especially military, etc. Just a thought out there for discussion anyways.

Answer 1

Not sure I'm following all of the nuances here ... but, there are already place Categories.  I didn't list all of the places I've lived on my profile but did put in the major ones ...

Here's the Category page for the USA ... click on the sub-category links to find your places ... https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:United_States_of_America

Answer 2

I believe that because as you noted that some people may live in a large number of locations having a field for locations would be a very expensive proposition with very little benefit. You can place that information very easily in the biography section and that is in my opinion the best place for that information.

Comments

Just in my case it would require 14 fields so far so that could be a lot of programming.

Answer 3

As Dale noted, you should just capture the information in the biography.

If you have some sources then you can probably glean an estimated birth date and place (at least if you have a US census). Another way to capture information about where people lived are the list of children’s birth dates and locations (again from census).

You can see I’ve included quite a bit of geography for Ephraim Sands, along with some story that elaborates the collection of sources and leads to descendants geography.

Answer 4

I sympathize with your thinking because place is so critical in genealogy - but it needs to be combined with time to be really useful. An ideal database would contain both places and the dates or periods someone was there, so that an ideal map tool could show your ancestors' movements throughout their lives, and list all the other people around them at any given time.

Sadly I think we are quite a way off from this being feasible. I do like to list people's residences with dates at the end of their biographies, though - it's the one place where I allow myself to diverge from the 'biographies should be narratives' in fact, because it can get a bit lost in the text.

Answer 5

Why not have a sticker for each country where you could add different place names under each country?

I have {{Sweden Sticker}} in my profile. It could easily be expanded to accommodate place names as well.

Comments

Ideally, you should limit the sticker use to no more than five stickers.

See: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Stickers#maximum number per profile

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I was thinking that one sticker could show different locations.