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Boundary changes

raven

raven

LostCousins Member
I am interested to know what other researchers do about towns and areas that change boundaries officially. Do you continue listing them under their original designation? I find this the easiest to do in order to keep track of a place, and if I need to look up (for example) all people listed in a town.

But sometimes it feels like its a headache to sort, especially those towns or areas which span more than one county or shire. I think my biggest headache is listing a place which used to belong in another shire, but has since been absorbed into the 'Greater London' area.

So, how do you work around this? And is there an 'official' genealogical rule for it? :confused:
 
The official rule as I've been taught is to use the name of the place at the time of the event.
You certainly don't want to lose the historic name as that is often the clue as to where to find the relevant records.

And recording the historic name is fine until you want everyone connected to A which once was in X but later was in Y and may now be in Z. Places being incorporated into London are bad enough but what if you had other European ancestry where it's the country that has changed several times and the records actually are in completely different places?
Some use the workaround of putting eg Surrey (now London)

Normally to get a list of everyone in a place in Legacy I use the Master Location List, sort right to left which brings the places in the same area together and then highlight the required ones and use Show List.
However for places like this I instead go to Detailed Search and Search for individuals where Place contains A. Currently you can't search on Any Place so you have to do a series of OR searches on Birth Place, Death Place etc.
 
I must admit I have used Legacy for several years now, and still haven't explored all its functions. (I've already learned a couple of new things just on this forum *grin*).

I think I might stick to using a place's more traditional setting, but when it spans counties I almost need to toss a coin. ;)
 
Well, if you use Legacy - don't forget you can put things in Location Notes even if just to remind yourself what you've done. Put anything you don't want to include in reports/web pages etc in privacy brackets [[anything in here won't be included unless you choose to do so on the Privacy tab of Report/Export etc]]
OR if you want it more obvious - privacy brackets work in the Location itself. eg Lambeth, Surrey[[now London]], England
 
England Jurisdictions 1851 at the FamilySearch site is a very good place to start.

GENUKI is another - but use Google to get to the page you want, eg 'genuki middleton st george' as it's virtually impossible to find your way around GENUKI.

Places that became part of London only when Greater London was formed still have the same postal addresses as before, so there's no reason to record them any differently. See also this Wikipedia article about the London Postal District.
 
Peter, I've read the article. Are you talking about 20th century changes? I basically lose interest by WW1 and am far more interested in 18th and 19th century when the postal districts were still developing. Are you dating the formation of Greater London to 1889 or 1917 or some other date?
 
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