Is there anyway that profiles could be more geographic specific to reduce mismatches?

+3 votes
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in Genealogy Help by Living Hancock G2G3 (3.7k points)

1 Answer

+2 votes
I entirely agree with this idea in principal, but practically speaking I imagine it would require overhauling how locations are entered from the ground up...

In addition there is the historical perspective of place names and boundaries changing plus amalgamations like the Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh Township. Is Louisiana, the modern state or the historic territory? What if two different places have the same name (that issue was part of the cause of the Arab-Israeli War). Do I enter Constantinople or Istanbul?

I suppose if I were prone to crazy expansive tangent thinking, I might solve this issue by adding a field for coordinates (Lat/Lon or UTM) that can be displayed accurately in mapping software like Google Maps, and the like. Then you could filter possible matches to those in a specific radius - but that might be a little server intensive to do.
by Rob Ton G2G6 Pilot (288k points)

Great points, Rob. (I'm really impressed with you as a new member. So glad you found WikiTree!)

Regarding location names, the style is to use the place name as the person themselves would have known it. This isn't easy but it at least gives us a standard.
http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Location_Fields

This does indeed making location matching even harder technically.

Down the road we plan to develop a method to automatically tease out geographic locations. That is, you could enter Palestine, Israel, or whatever, and the system would know it's the same place.

Your comment underlines the possible merit of adding a field for coordinate references. Just to expand on my earlier post:

A coordinate points to a physical location on the earth, and changes very small amounts over extremely long periods (technically projections, datums and reference systems have, and do, change frequently but can also be converted mathematically); using a proximity search based on coordinates to match places would be computationally easier to manage than matching place names as they change over history.

I imagine it would be easy enough for a programmer to use some mapping API (Google, Microsoft, MapQuest, etc.) to create a point and click interface that returns coordinates to store. Some GIS and programming wizard could even probably create a widget that animates the migration of a family line over multiple generations, or clusters of families that migrate together. Or search people based on proximity to an historic event. Who lived in Boston during the tea party?

Taking it one step further, it would also be possible to 'reverse lookup' a proper 'period' name based on the date of an event. I point and click on Toronto, Ontario, Canada - because I specified that the person is born in 1812, it could recommend that I instead use York, Upper Canada.

Obviously the place names field would still be required.
I think that we could do all this without the need for two location fields (one for names, one for numbers). We should be able to use the names and automatically connect them with coordinates.

As is all to often the case, G2G has diverted my attention in a different direction. So yet again my data entry backlog will be delayed until another time because of the detour. Not complaining really though, as the trip has been fascinating. As with most trips nowadays, Google plotted my destinations.

 

Have you Googled map your genealogy?

 

My serendipitous journey ended upon arriving at a destination named Making a Genealogy Map Using Google Maps. ( http://www.ianatkinson.net/computing/genealogymap.htm ) Geek heaven!

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