Place talk:Fostoria, Hancock, Ohio, United States

Fostoria is a city located in northwest Ohio, in Hancock, Seneca, and Wood counties. I feel it may cause confusion to have the Place:Fostoria, Ohio page redirected to here. Causing anyone seeing a "Fostoria, Ohio" event to think that that event took place in Hancock County. Rest assured that any of my events that simply say "Fostoria, Ohio" may or may not have taken place in Hancock Co. In fact it is more probable they took place in Seneca county, as the majority of my family lived in the Seneca County part of Fostoria. --Msscarlet1957 06:10, 24 November 2007 (EST)

We could have three separate place pages for Fostoria (as we have now) and delete the redirect for "Fostoria, Ohio". This would mean that GEDCOMs that just listed "Fostoria, Ohio" wouldn't automatically link to any of the three places, since it wouldn't be clear which one to link to. This seems less than ideal, since there's really only one Fostoria in Ohio -- it just happens to exist in three separate counties. Around the end of this month we're going to be updating the place pages. One of the things we're going to do is rename the "previously located in" field to "also located in", so we can better handle cases where a place is simultaneously located under multiple places. If we were to use this approach for Fostoria, it would mean that we would have one place page for Fostoria instead of three. The page would have one of the three counties in its title (it doesn't matter to the system which one), with the other two counties listed as "also located in" places. GEDCOM's with "Fostoria, Ohio" would link to this page. Searches for people/family pages in any of the three counties would return people/families with events in Fostoria. This can also help in matching, since two people linking to the same place page will get a slightly higher matching score than two people linking to different place pages. What do you think?--Dallan 01:29, 25 November 2007 (EST)

More confusion clarification for Fostoria [27 November 2007]

This is a difficult issue, I myself as a genealogist strive to list the place exactly as it is proper to be listed. Here are a couple examples: If a person is buried at St. Wendelin cemetery it is definitely [place:St. Wendelin catholic cemetery, Fostoria, Hancock, Ohio, United States] and the records for that are located at the court house in [place:Findlay, Hancock, Ohio, United States] and if a person died at St. Catherine Care center (nursing home) it is definitely [place:St. Catherine Care center, Fostoria, Seneca, Ohio, United States] and records for that are found in [place:Tiffin, Seneca, Ohio, United States]

--Now if I am creating a place page for St. Wendelin cemetery and then while filling in the "located in" place, I type in Fostoria and the only thing that appears in the drop down list is [place:Fostoria, seneca, Ohio, United States] I am not going to choose that. I am going to go and create a page for Fostoria, Hancock, Ohio as that is where this cemetery is located. I have taken extra effort to look on maps and list the proper county for any location in Fostoria, such as the churches and the cemeteries that I can find.

--Fostoria is NOT a county seat, thus the records for a birth, death, etc. that took place here might be found at Bowling Green Ohio (for the Wood county events) at Tiffin, Ohio (for the Seneca county events) or at Findlay, Ohio for the Hancock County events. Therefore keeping the redirect of "Fostoria, Ohio" events to place:Fostoria, Hancock, Ohio, United states page could lead folks down the wrong path to seek records for that event in Findlay, which may in fact be located in Bowling Green or Tiffin (many miles apart).

--I also feel that in genealogy it is more important to correctly list the name of the county than the name of the city, as the name of the COUNTY tells you which county seat city you need to visit to find documentation to prove that event. I would not be happy to suddenly see that page I created for [place:St. Catherine Care center, Fostoria, Seneca, Ohio, United States] to suddenly be listed as [place:St. Catherine Care center, Fostoria, Hancock, Ohio, United States]

--I feel we must think a bit about the additional sub-hierarchy in place names, being that of churches and cemeteries and places of death such as hosptials, etc. These will need to be using the correct city and county for their location identification. I feel we still need all four Fostoria pages to use in the drop down list for these items. As mentioned before we need to be able to choose the [place:Fostoria, Ohio, United States] for those places in which we are not sure yet of the county of location. This could be edited later after one figures out the proper county.

--I realize you are attempting to have a way to make the merge work better, and I really am looking forward to that happening, but not if it means reporting places in the wrong county, thus loosing research integrity. I have spent endless years working on correctly listing my places for events and attempting to establish a good genealogical reputation. So might I ask... when you put your new "located in" idea in action, how will this effect the various sub-listed types like cemetery and church that already have pages listed correctly, but with one city, and more than one county, such as Fostoria has. Will those pages be lost, redirected, renamed or some other? --Msscarlet1957 19:22, 25 November 2007 (EST)

Just like we can do presently, under the new approach we could have redirects for Fostoria in the other counties that would redirect to main Fostoria page so that there would be just one (non-redirect) page for Fostoria. This is how we're going to address the (similar) problem of place X being in county Y from 1800-1900, but county Z from 1900 onward -- rather than creating two separate place pages, we'll create one page entitled "X, Y, ..." with possibly a redirect from "X, Z, ..." to that page.

So I'm not sure that creating four separate place pages for Fostoria is the right way to go, but I don't have strong feelings about it. We can leave it the way it is for now with four separate place pages (I'll turn Place:Fostoria, Ohio into a non-redirect page), and see if anyone else has comments in the future.

Regarding places "below" cities, after the new also-located-in field is in place places below cities will stay the way they are now, located in the particular city (or township) that the creator has put them in.

--Dallan 16:10, 27 November 2007 (EST)