Standardising Locations in Your Family Tree

Why location standardisation matters

Inconsistent place names create problems:

• Mapping failures: "London" vs "London, England" vs "London, Middlesex, England" may map differently
• Missed connections: People from the same place won't cluster together if names vary
• Census matching: Country detection relies on recognisable place formats
• Migration analysis: Origin/destination grouping fails with inconsistent names

Standardising locations improves every geographic analysis in GEDminer.

Common location problems

Typical inconsistencies found in GEDCOM files:

• Different levels: "York" vs "York, Yorkshire" vs "York, Yorkshire, England"
• Historical names: "Christiania" vs "Oslo", "Bombay" vs "Mumbai"
• Abbreviations: "NY" vs "New York" vs "New York, USA"
• Misspellings: "Birmigham" instead of "Birmingham"
• Mixed formats: Some places comma-separated, others not
• County changes: Historical counties differ from modern administrative areas
• Country omissions: City names without country context

How GEDminer handles locations

GEDminer processes your locations in several ways:

• Geocoding: Looks up coordinates for each unique place name
• Country detection: Parses place strings to identify the country (used by Census Toolbox)
• Clustering: Groups nearby locations on the map
• Hierarchy building: Creates country > region > town structures for the Location Explorer

Better input data produces better results at every stage.

Best practices for place formatting

Follow these conventions in your genealogy software:

• Use the full hierarchy: Town, County/Region, State/Province, Country
• Be consistent: Pick one format and use it everywhere
• Include country: Always add the country, even if obvious to you
• Use modern names: Use current country names unless the historical name is significant
• Spell out abbreviations: "United States" not "US", "New York" not "NY"
• Separate with commas: "London, England, United Kingdom"

Fixing locations in your GEDCOM

To improve location data:

1. Review the Location Explorer: See which places GEDminer has identified
2. Check for variants: Multiple entries for the same place indicate inconsistencies
3. Fix in your software: Update place names in your genealogy program
4. Use find-and-replace: Most genealogy software supports bulk place name changes
5. Re-export and re-analyse: Upload the corrected GEDCOM to verify improvements

Start with the most frequent locations - fixing a place that appears 50 times has more impact than fixing one that appears once.

Historical place name resources

Helpful resources for identifying old place names:

• GenUKI: UK historical counties and jurisdictions
• Meyers Gazetteer: German place names and historical boundaries
• JewishGen Gazetteer: Eastern European towns with multiple historical names
• Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names: Authoritative historical place data
• Wikipedia: Often lists former names and administrative changes

Understanding how boundaries and names changed helps you search the right records in the right repositories.