Geocode your places database

Nick Peers reveals how to add precise coordinates to all the places in your tree

Geocoding allows you to tag a location with its longitude and latitude, making it easy to pinpoint buildings or street addresses on maps. The GEDCOM format has long made it possible to record these coordinates alongside every place in your database, but it’s only fairly recently that other programs have started to integrate features to take full advantage of their abilities to pinpoint places on a map.

Before you can start using geocodes, you need to ensure your locations are properly recorded in your Places database. Each program works in a slightly different way, but the broad steps are similar and involve making sure your locations follow a proper jurisdictional structure, namely place (town, village or city), county/state, country (here, include England, Wales and so on in addition to the UK). Additional details, such as a street address or church name, are usually recorded in a separate field, which varies from program to program (for example, it’s Place Detail in RootsMagic and Family Tree Maker). If no specific field exists, record it in the Description or Notes field.

This step-by-step guide takes you through the whole process of correcting place names, then adding those allimportant geocodes. We’ve used the full version of RootsMagic, but the steps should be easy to adapt for other programs. 1

Correctly Enter Place Names When adding new facts in RootsMagic, get into the habit of recording the jurisdictional detail under ‘Place’, and other details under ‘Place details’, as shown above. Click ‘Save’ – if the CountyCheck dialogue pops up, review its suggested amendment before clicking ‘Change’ to make the correction. 2

Fix Existing Places You can perform a quick review of all previously recorded places by choosing ‘Lists’ > ‘Place List’. It’s likely some – if not most – addresses aren’t correctly entered. To remedy this, select a place and click ‘Edit’. First, click ‘Split place/ details’ to move street addresses into the ‘Place details’ field. 3

Fix Jurisdiction Issues After clicking ‘OK’, the street address will seem to vanish – don’t worry, it hasn’t been removed. If necessary, add additional jurisdictions to your address, then click ‘GeoCode’. Not only does this generate GPS coordinates, it also provides the standard place name. If correct, click ‘Use standardised place’.

4

Edit Related Places After clicking ‘OK’, you’ll see its details, with your street address beneath under ‘Place details’. If there are additional addresses that share the same village, town or city, first edit them to move the required street details into the ‘Place details’ field, as shown in step two. 5

Merge Duplicates Once moved, don’t worry about fixing the rest of the place name; instead, click ‘OK’. Repeat for other street addresses, then select your correct entry from step three and click ‘Merge’. Tick all the places you wish to merge with this entry and choose ‘Merge selected places’. 6

Manage Street Addresses The entries will be merged into the main entry, with individual street addresses now appearing as separate entries in the ‘Place details’ list. To manage these, click the ‘Place details’ button at the top. Select an entry from the list to choose whether to delete, merge it with duplicate entries, or edit it. 7

Geocode Street Addresses Click ‘Edit’ to manually enter longitude and latitude coordinates – click ‘Online map’ to attempt a search in your browser using Bing Maps. No results? Check your spellings or use a resource like maps.thehunthouse.com/ London_Miscellany.htm to see if the place name has changed. 8

Find Match When you find the correct place, right- click the pin in Bing Maps to reveal its geocodes. Click ‘Copy’, then switch back to RootsMagic. Paste the first coordinate into the Latitude box, and the second into Longitude. If entered correctly, they will convert to degrees, minutes and seconds (eg 51° 39' 42.97" N). 9

Make Use Of Geocodes If you have any photos or notes, click the appropriate button beneath the geocodes to add them. Select ‘OK’ when done, then repeat for other places. To view places on a map (see main illustration), choose ‘Tools’ > ‘Mapping’ to browse. Click a place to reveal its links to people and events.