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Historical names of City and Country

Itamar Kazachinsky

August 15, 2011 22:21

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Hi Geni team,
I would like to automatically get the historical country and city names when updating the birth/death locations of a new profile. Many cities in Eastern Europe, for instance, changed names when the countries borders passed across them. Brothers may all be born in the same house but with different countries (nationalities) and city names.
Even if you find the automatic feature to be too complicated, it would be helpful to have two location fields - one for the historical name at the time of the event (birth/death etc.), and a second field for today's name.

- tnx for your good work

8 comments

• 0
  
  Bjørn P. Brox August 16, 2011 11:23

  Just click edit details and enter whatever values you want.

  The "simple" location field are bound to Google Map lookup and is just a "helper", and will naturally only show current names.

• 0
  
  Itamar Kazachinsky August 21, 2011 14:16

  I do use the natural solution as you proposed, but I was looking for two upgrades (drop it in the wish list):

  1. additional fields for historical versus present city/county/country names

  2. automatic suggestions based on a table of historical borders/names. Perhaps it should wait for the invention of Google Historical Maps.

  - tnx, Itamar K.

• 0
  
  Carl-Wilhelm de Boor April 21, 2012 22:06

  No matter what city name I enter, what ends up in the record is that location's current name. As long as that goes on, I am forced to leave that location field blank, hence the record in complete.

• 1
  
  Terry Jackson (Switzer) February 28, 2013 19:50

  For a historical site Geni should be defaulting to historic geographic locations rather than modern ones and if they cannot do this then they should just have entry fields as in the 'helper' as Bjorn calls it. A dream scenario would be to enter the modern name and be given a drop down menu from which you can select a date and the appopriate place name for that date is entered. (Probably pie in the sky though)

• 0
  
  Eldon Clark (Geni volunteer curator) February 28, 2013 22:19

  The "simple' location field needs to go away and the fields hidden  under "edit" should always be visible.

• 0
  
  Volodya Mozhenkov June 18, 2014 04:36

  Also keep in mind that some territories are "disputed". So automatic conversion based on date maybe incorrect.

• 0
  
  Will Chapman (Vol. Curator) November 15, 2014 17:51

  I've just started a Discussion related to this issue - check out http://www.geni.com/discussions/143170

• 0
  
  Dan Cornett June 10, 2015 16:19

  If GPS location coordinates were to be available & exposed for use on profiles (as part of each location's details), then that could help to define the 'modern'/current location while allowing the other fields to reflect the historically accurate names.