Where an event takes place is a critical attribute for all events. How it is identified is also important. The place should be the correct place for the time the event, but all too often that can get confusing and not allow GIS tools to operate.
As a general rule, I do not code a specific place with an event. As I discussed in my discussion of vital events, I will often include the church where a marriage or baptism or funeral takes place and a cemetery where a burial takes place, but most other events are documented to the most precise political entity provable.
What I mean is that I base the political entity by using the general four part model of village/town/city, county, state, country. Of course, I massage it based on the realities of the time of the event and the country where the event takes place.
I also base a bit of my handling of place names on personal preference and comments over almost two dozen years publishing on line. In general, I do not add a country on United States locations. The standards folks seem to require it, but most scholarly genealogy journals published in the US do not require it.
I used to add UK at the end of all of my UK places. Enough of my UK colleagues over the years have convinced me that UK is not their country. Their country is England, Wales, Scotland, etc. so I accede to their wisdom. In the UK, I have chosen, in general, to document the county as the traditional county as that seems to be as the GIS tools I have work. (I should mention that I would like to document Yorkshire location by their riding, but the GIS systems just lump all of Yorkshire together.
In the UK, I will in general display the county in a way that indicates that it is a county. Shropshire is always Shropshire, not Salop. Buckinhamshire is never Bucks or Buckingham. Durham is always County Durham.
In the US, a county name is always followed by an appropriate modifier to declare it a county. For instance, Boston would be Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts. (Yes, States will always have their name written out, not Postal Code or Chapman code abbreviations.) New Orleans is New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana. When you see an event taking place in Albany, New York, do you know for sure if that is the city or the county?
The place level of the name will try to document the type of political unit if it is something other than just a town or city. This can sometimes get confusing and sometimes requires that a place name get split into multiple parts for precision.
In the US, villages/towns/cities can be part of a larger unit but still within a county. For instance, I live in South Nashua which is a named neighborhood within the city of Nashua. It has no political or governmental organization of its own, but records can list it is as a location. So, I might record and event as taking place in South Nashua, Nashua, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire. In several states, including most of New England and New York, you have counties divided into Towns. Within the Towns that by themselves may or may be anything more than a geographic area, you can incorporated villages, cities, or towns. This can get confusing because if a Town can have a town within it. When a record relates to the Town, the word Town should be included in the name.
More seriously is who many of the midwestern and western states were laid out. The counties were laid out then with in the counties were created Townships. Also within the counties, villages, towns and cities were incorporated and often the incorporated towns would span multiple Townships (and even sometimes multiple counties…). When I have a record that is to refer to a specific incorporated town, like where my great-grandfather lived which was Alton, Franklin County, Ohio, I will not feel a need to identify the Township. However, the census records that included Alton were organized by toe Township. So, when I record a census event, I record it as taking place in Prairie Township, Franklin County, Ohio. Some places in the US might be organized as Boroughs. Getting the name of a place where an event took place correct can be a challenge.
Some places, like most cities, were divided up by Wards. As Wards were re-aligned usually with every census or more often if there were population changes. I will identify the Ward in my notes on the event, not as a different places.
Similar principals apply to how I treat places in the UK. I usually only identify parishes in notes on the event unless I decide to add it as a finer level to the town or city.
An important place addition that I use in the UK has to do with Registration Districts. I will document all of the 1837 and on Civil Registrations using special custom events. The location is always listed like Oxford Registration District, Oxfordshire, England. As that is where the civil registration was done, not necessarily where the associated vital event took place. However, I will always try to give the location of any vital event with the most precise location possible and that might be the Registration District if I have no documentation that tells me the location more precisely. I will also use the Registration date for the vital event date if that is the most precise date I have for the event.
Incomplete Locations
More often than I care to think about, I will get a record with a place name and a US State or UK country but no indication of what county and when I try to find it, I find that several counties were possible. In those cases where I cannot deduce the correct location, I will record the place with a county place-filler, as Pleasant, ____, Ohio. I find I am needing to do this less as fewer records are so incomplete and additional records seem to be available to clarify the situation. I also find that I might get a record that does not even identify the country or state. In these cases, I will leave the location blank and document what I know in the associated note.
The important takeaway from this discussion of documenting places is that when you document a location, you must make it clear to any reader where the event took place. Never assume the county or country will be obvious to every reader. London might see to be enough, but if it were a Canadian, they might think it meant the city in Ontario.
Mapping
If you are not using mapping as part of your genealogical research, you are missing something important. Very often, by looking at a map and seeing the villages and town near where an event took place, I better understand how to sort out families.
When I publish online, I publish with having the an ability to display a dynamic map of the events. However, to get this map, I need to first Geocode (ie, add latitude and longitude) for the locations. Different programs have different tools for this. Every major application now seems to have some way to add Geocoding at at least a moderate level of precision. And the application has some way for you to manually enter the Geocodes to either make them more precise or just to enter them. My preferred methodology is to Geocode in my desktop application so that I always have it. And as in my application, if I Geocode a place once, that is good for whenever I use that location.
Some places I like to make sure are very precise, like cemeteries and churches. Or for small villages where many events took place or not included in a GIS database being used.
Some applications allow you to do a lookup to find a location on a map and drop a pin to set the Geocodes for a location; others will look up the data in a GIS database. Others will let you get the data from a 3rd party source and copy it into the location. I use FindaGrave to get precise locations for most of the cemeteries in their database. I will use Wikipedia to get the Latitude/Longitude for locations in its database. I will use Google Maps to find locations and copy the precision coordinates from the URL it is using. There are literally hundreds of free tools you can use to obtain the Geocodes.
In most genealogy programs, locations can have notes and media added in addition to the Geocodes. I will often add one or the other or both to location that are important as this information can be useful in telling the story of the people. I will often share the history of a town to describe the political history and names it has taken through time. Instead of the GIS location, I will often Geocode a town by where the city or town hall is. If I can find a picture of the the city hall, I will add it to the location. If I can find a picture of a church or cemetery, I will add that to those locations. If I have a county level location, I will Geocode that at the site of the County Building. And, yes, include a picture of the building, an abbreviated history of the county, etc. And yes, I will do the same for State and Country level places. I have been known to add map pictures for some locations when it was important to see historical maps.
Most of the previous discussion was targeted at US locations; I try to make similar efforts for locations in all countries.
I would like to say that I spent all of this time getting every location right and fully documented. I do not. But I try to do it for the locations that matter most in my genealogies where I know it will add to the understanding.
