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Re: Standard format for places in the USA

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Thanks to all for the responses.

Unfortunately, that KB link is what caused my query. No real help for entering the info. I've also looked at other KB articles and the FTM Companion Guide with no success. The PNA is an absurd combination of locations that offers no help.

Obviously, everyone using FTM is entering location info but I see (on Ancestry.com) many variations.

Hmmm, hadn't thought about the GEDCOM Standard but that seems to be about the only ref available. FTM seems to be mostly compliant with 5.5.1 which advocates something like

[Juris1, Juris2, Juris3, Juris]4 or
[Juris1, , Juris3, Juris4] for an independent city, or
[, Juris2, Juris3, Juris4] for a county only reference.

The above would look pretty ugly in some of the printed reports. And I don't like leaving empty holes to represent information. FTM seems to interpret [Juris1, Juris2, Juris3] as meaning [, Juris2, Juris3, Juris4] (County, State, USA). After a little experimenting, it seems FTM disregards the word "county" and I see other issues with both bing mapping and place names.

IMHO the bottom line is that the naming convention used must be understandable by humans so I am inclined to add "county" where I can. Unfortunately, FTM doesn't want me to make that edit to some county names.

Another thought is that the jurisdictional hierarchy seems a logical construct. Until now I have tried to fit all places into the [city,county,state,USA] mold. However, a top-down, jurisdictional hierarchy seems to work reasonably well. I have had trouble with New York city but from a top-down look it becomes USA, New York, New York, Manhattan with no actual county named.

Again, thanks for the assist...

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