Genealogy Chat

How do people get away with putting people in their tree without a place of birth.A lot of my Hotmatches have no place of birth but when I forget to put it in I get a message telling me to add it.Even a vague idea of the area is useful.
Heather

By importing the info as a GEDCOM file.

I agree that it useful if you know the place of birth.

Unfortunately the Matches IGNORE the place names.

Ken

If you don't know the place of birth for example the perople right at the top of your tree you can type "null"

I try and put something as POB - sometimes I only know the country, sometimes I have no idea, and then I put Not Known.

I find the lack of place of birth very annoying as it reduces the value of a possible match enormously.

In fact, unless the name is unusual I tend to ignore those with no PoB.

I think there are arguments for and against matches ignoring place names. Yes it is annoying if a supposed match is between people born in Inverness and Penzance, but on the other hand if you only had a vague idea and put, say, Devon and a match comes up with Exeter that's a promising one to follow up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

I've thought about that exasperating thing about completely unmatching places in the alleged HotMatches.

Then it dawned on me:
Matching the same numbers is a doddle, but the algorithms to get a computer programme to recognise which places are where, which places are the same but spelled differently (or incorrectly, or the other way around) - or, even more complex, which are near enough to be potential matches - would be horrendous. I think it's one of those things which require human brains to work.

Christine

I sometimes put in little notes in place of birthplaces if I don't know them. For instance if I have an Alice Smith in my tree who was born 1827 in Preston and all I know about her husband is that he was called Charles Jones and born in 1825, I might put a note in place of his birthplace saying "married Alice Smith, lived in Preston".

Also, as Christine mentions, I have many relatives born in Ormskirk but the possible number of ways people can enter it into the tree on this site are probably endless - the computer probably doesn't know "Ormskirk" is the same town as "Ormskirk, Lancashire" and "Ormskirk, Lancashire, England".

Exactly Kate - as has been mentioned before.
The stupid thing is that when GR demanded a place of birth when I had no idea as to where the husband who arrived on the goldfields from somewhere was born - I put 'and don't believe the country' as the town and 'Usbekestan' as the country, presuming that people would realise that it was being ridiculous.
I gave access to my tree (a limited one) to a distant rellie who has his ancestor born in - you guessed it. I wonder what his children will think in years to come. My GGGrandfather was a Russian Tsar?
B

And, of course, another thing is that registration districts change and/or have names that don't relate to present day names. For instance in the 19th century Macclesfield (Cheshire) was 'Sutton'. Most people these days would think of Sutton as the one in Surrey