I sent this message today. How does your experience compare with mine?
Dear FamilySearch Support.
Standardizing place names has always been a quagmire, but I think it can be improved if we get the engineers involved.
If I remember correctly, when I served in FamilySearch Support, the instructions were to choose the standard place name closest to the actual place. If the local place is not identified, choose the most specific level that is identified.
If the place for the event is not identified, use "of" + some place the individual lived. And use "about" + the approximate time the event would have occurred. This enables us to fix the individual in time and space, facilitating further research, and helping the system to find historical records as sources.
Lately I see a tendency to sacrifice the accuracy of such estimates in favor of unwarranted precision. In a recent Youtube video people are saying "Remove the 'of's and 'about's, FamilySearch does not want them." If that is the case, then estimates are no longer properly identified as estimates, and confusion results. Genealogy is not always like physical sciences, where facts can be measured with high precision. e.g. Prior to the 1900s people were typically born at home on the farm, and not in town.
An obstacle to standardizing place names is that there may be different standard place names for the same place over time, and in the mobile app it is usually impossible to know which of the 10 standard names is correct at the time the event occurred. Can't we simplify this? If that locality was called by the same name across the centuries, why worry about what the local government was? i.e. focus on geography rather than politics
And coordinate the automatic matching with the places listed in the "Other Events", so that priority can be given to getting the Country correct, rather than the current situation, where priority is given to matching the Locality, even if the "matching locality" is thousands of miles away from the real place.
In my personal experience, I found that many of my ancestors were standardized as living in the tiny Scotland district on the island of St Helena rather than in the actual country of Scotland, due to a flaw in the computer algorithm. Ask anyone doing research in Ukraine how often "Galicia, Austria" gets standardized as "Galicia, Spain". Match on the largest jurisdictions, not the smallest, and such errors will tend to disappear.
Please forward this message to Todd or someone who will understand the finer points.
Let's see if we can get the "matching" algorithm fixed.
Thank you,
Bill Buchanan
My blog: http://billbuchanan.blogspot.com
My FamilySearch blog https://billsfamilyhistorycenter.blogspot.com/
