Comments on: RootsMagic 4 Unwrapped – Places and Geocoding

By: P J Evans

P J Evans — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:54:50 +0000

Charlou, I’ve even considered (and I still might do it) buying all the USGS quads on CD (National Geographic has them) and writing down every one of the township names, just to have a list (for states that have named townships, anyway).

I also agree with you about county names – I have a number of them from imported files where I can’t tell if it’s a town or a county name (sometimes it doesn’t matter, but not usually). Some even are missing the state, or the country.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:54:57 +0000

I just tried out the geocoding interface in the preview …

It took about a minute and gave me a list of all the “goofy” place names in my database so I could review them and clean them up. I can’t wait until I can do this on my “working” database!

By: Charlou Dolan

Charlou Dolan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:13:52 +0000

I use the Place Finder you included with RootsMagic a lot, but where it falls down (and where most atlases don’t help) is with townships. I know there is a very $$$ book of township maps for the U.S. out there, but I don’t have that book. Are you adding township/county/state to the search possibilities? Also, please, Please, PLEASE don’t remove the word Co. (or County) from the standard addresses — I am so tired of looking at other people’s research on places like RootsWeb and not being able to tell if they are talking about Des Moines Co., Iowa, for example, or Des Moines, Polk Co., Iowa. There are too many cases of towns with the same names as counties, or townships with the same names.

By: Shirley Joiner

Shirley Joiner — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:18:23 +0000

To C. R. Andrews. I agree completely with your preference of listing places from the largest to the smallest. Also, on the Family Group Sheet, I would like to see the place name come before the description of the event (rather than tacking the place name onto the end of the description) so I quickly can see that my person is where he should be.

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:57:54 +0000

I use Family Atlas to generate maps using my Roots Magic data. How much overlap will there be between this new feature and Family Atlas?

By: P J Evans

P J Evans — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:01:39 +0000

As far as place names – I hope townships will show up in the place listings at some point, but I’ll survive it they aren’t.
(I generally put ‘co’ or ‘twp’ or ‘par’ in the place, so I can tell them from other placenames.)

Reverse listing – if you print your place list to a file, you can get it in largest-to-smallest order automagically in RM3.

GeoCode: whatever program you put it in *ought* to be able to handle both DMS and decimal degrees. Or you can get a scientific calculator that will do the conversion – I have a Casio, runs about $15, that does it just fine – and enter it yourself.

(Whatever you do, try to make it the same for all the placenames, because cleaning up long lists is a pain.)

By: Elynn

Elynn — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:18:10 +0000

How cool. I guess that means I can uninstall PlaceFinder.

Also, I’ve noticed in the census that there will be precincts within the cities, and I’ve included them. Example – Pct 6 (part), Sulphur Springs, Hopkins Co, Texas

I hope that we can add those in also.

By: Arthur Owen

Arthur Owen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:41:49 +0000

I agree with GaryT’s request to have the option of showing the geocode info as decimal values. Mapping services such as Google seem to use this format. Will the GeoCoded info be included in an exported GEDCOM (a la Legacy)?

By: John James

John James — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:46:44 +0000

C.R, I understand your plea and the usefulness of the reverse listing but this is a great step forward in helping the global standardisation of place notation and I hope all gen programs adopt a similar approach.

The variation in the way places are recorded is very frustrating and time consuming when importing data from other researchers, this approach might take years to bring about more standardised data but it is very much needed.

Reversing the listing I agree is very useful and has been asked for many times, I am sure there will be something more in RM4 regarding places to help manage the lists we have, in the meantime I export mine to a .csv file, open it in a spreadsheet program and then sort it whatever way I like. Hope this helps.

By: C.R. Andrews

C.R. Andrews — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:06:20 +0000

One more comment on my “REVERSE” way of listing places — it makes it a **whole lot** easier to:
(1) catch misspellings
(2) locate duplicates that aren’t obvious when listed in the “normal” order
(3) prevent auto-complete errors

On that last one, if you have Wilkes County, Georgia and Wilkes County, North Carolina in your Place List, and you’re typing fast but not paying close attention, then RootsMagic will auto-complete with the Georgia entry if you don’t keep typing to completion. What if you meant North Carolina, but didn’t notice? Whoops!