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Archiver > GENBOX > 2003-05 > 1054412337


From: "Cheri Casper" <>
Subject: RE: [GENBOX] Nuances of Places
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 13:19:12 -0700
In-Reply-To: <LJECKLFMNLFFEIMDFGGDOEAIDIAA.w.prange@chello.nl>


Wim - I *have* tried making a place without the county. Remember my post
about Merriam, Kansas, trying to get it WITHOUT Johnson County? That is the
problem. As you have pointed out, it may be a function of autocompletion
but trying to make a variation without the county is difficult if the county
is already linked to the city/town as the standard. It would seem that you
really need to create the city/town and connect it to the state *before*
making a variant WITH the county, not vice versa. In other words, it is
easy to *add* a place level in a name variant, but trying to *take away* a
place level in a name variant is a pain in the patoot.

I agree about censuses. This comes back to my point for different place
fields at the event level and the ability to exclude. If you filled in just
the city/town & state, that is what you would get on output. If you filled
in the county, that is what you would get UNLESS there was a provision to
suppress a given place level AT THE EVENT LEVEL, similiar to the ability to
suppress or exclude the Annotation from a Citation. This would require,
however, that each place level have its own data entry field for the events
and that there be some ability to enter the data (or not) on an
event-by-event basis and yet be able to suppress the output (with override
capabilities at the Report Definition). If I wanted to enter my place of
birth completely as Trinity Lutheran Hospital, Kansas City, Jackson County,
Missouri, I could do so but mark to exclude the name of the hospital and the
county and yet still be able override that exclusion in the report
definition. Same for census events. For those I would probably enter
city/town, county, and state and yet want all places to print out so I
wouldn't mark to exclude. Perhaps one way to accomplish this (I don't know
a tot about programming so maybe it isn't doable) would be the ability to
mark place levels that you don't want to print out in the square brackets,
similar to what is used for sort dates. Then there would be a mechanism in
the report definitions to override that if the user desired. However, this
might interfer with how the place hierarchy is set up. Adding some sort of
symbols in the middle of a place field could be problematic. That would be
one alternative, although I would still prefer a separate field for each
parcel of place data.

I guess in one regard this is where I consider the "other" program superior.
I could enter all of the place levels and control the output at the event
level. I had three ways to *exclude* material and yet had the ability to
override those exclusions coupled with choices of levels for output.

CheriC

-----Original Message-----
From: wim prange [mailto:]
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2003 12:12 PM
To:
Subject: RE: [GENBOX] Nuances of Places


> For the most part, I would just prefer that counties go away all together
> although I do like them attached to the city/town for reference purposes.
> But for display and reports, NO. That is another reason why I
> would prefer
> a separate field for each part of a place level. If I omitted the county
> name, I would expect the name to NOT display the omitted level.
> Alternatively, the ability to add any place level at the Event level and
> suppress it from EVER PRINTING.
>
> Sheesh. Why is this so difficult?
>
> CheriC

When you want to omit the county-name in most cases, why not make the
Name-variant without the county-name the Standard Name?

Also, with reports there are several possibilities on the details tab to
suppress certain levels from printing: L1-L6 can be set separately, or you
can choose to print only the lowest from L2-L4 (City - Township - County)
and/or the lowest from L5-L6 (State - Nation). In most cases, this would
never print the County (being the highest from the lower levels).
This is ofcourse dependent on the organisation of your Placestable: if all
your Counties are promoted to L5 (States) because you wanted more ‘room’ in
the lower regions, then you would have to use a custom setting (a tick in LL
and a tick in L6).

I haven't experimented with using these settings and the eventcode [L+]
(Like [L] but forced to show full place levels always). I believe Counties
have an important significance in a Census-event, you could use that code
and select the name-variant including the county-name for the place-field. I
think this code overrides the setting in reports but don't know for sure

Gr. Wim



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