You may have seen the recent posts announcing the implementation of a new category scheme for locations in Ireland. As this is being rolled out, we thought it might be helpful to show what this looks like using an example, County Donegal.
If you head to the County category you can see that profiles have been removed as far as possible. A new category Unknown Location has been added for each County to catch any profiles that cannot be assigned to a particular location.
Towns are now defined as Town, County Name. There are several cases where towns are also parishes and/or townlands (e.g. Stranorlar). The choice of which category to use in these cases is yours.
Civil Parishes are categorised as before (albeit with their full name) but a set of free space pages has been used to manage the change from the previous categorisation scheme and to manage these going forward - the index is linked below. There is a page for each parish - the intention is that these will look like this example once the change to the new scheme is complete. All civil parish categories will link to their own free space page.
Townlands are now called Name Townland, Name Parish, County Name for maximum clarity. All defined townlands now have a Category Information Box (CIB) that links to their parish page and logainm.ie (see this example).
Without going too much into the detail, consideration has been given to townlands and parishes that fall into multiple baronies and a lot of checking done against several sources to ensure that any given location can be defined within the scheme.
While all civil parishes are defined, townlands are defined as they are required - for example in Donegal there are 372 townlands defined, whereas townlands.ie shows 2,712 townlands. So, quite a few left to go!
It is probably important to note there is no requirement for profiles to be categorised. As leader for the Donegal project I may choose over time to look for profiles in the townlands to maximise the extent of categorisation but that is purely down to me. Any user can request the creation of a category that does not already exist.
You can also choose to categorise based on place of birth or death, where a person lived - the new scheme does not place any constraints of this nature.
Any comments or feedback welcome - and, again, a huge thank-you to David Loring for his work on the creation of all the parish and townland pages for the rollout.
