Rootsmagic Places and Place Details

If you watched the Rootsmagic video with Mike Booth you will have noticed that he commented on "GPS" and "marrying genealogy with geography". Well, Place Details is a great new addition to the Rootsmagic program but unfortunately we still have quite a road to travel to bring about that marriage between genealogy and geography.

Think like the detective who asks "where were you on the 10th of March around 10am", if you where miles away then you are not connected to the crime. However proximity in both time and place does start to suggest a possible link.

That is where Place Details comes in and the accurate GeoCoding of where events through history took place. Programs such as Rootsmagic may not be able to make full use of this information yet in reporting and searching but I very much hope will do in the future. We live today in a world of very accurate online mapping services and satellite navigation so genealogy needs to get onboard.

The current event detail section contains the Date of the event and a little icon to access the date calculator.

The Place itself and an icon alongside which will show your place in your place database and from their another button will show the place in an Online Mapping service.

The Place Details and suggestive text make that place more precise within the general Place in this case, Ballymena, Antrim. The icon alongside takes you to a list of Place Details currently noted within that general Place.

Unfortunately still within the 4.0.9.5 release the suggestive Place Details are not presented unless you previously press the SAVE button. This is strange as the PLACE is actually saved when you leave the Place field. However the problem has been reported to Rootsmagic and will hopefully get fixed in the near future.

The main problem of migrating from the single Place entry to the new Place and Place Details format is the time it takes to change all those entries in your database. Presently you might have a Place such as East Barsham (Cottage Hospital), Wallsingham, Norfolk, England, which was the location of 100 birth events. To change that in the current version of RM means changing 100 individual entries! a mammoth task by any standards.

A new Edit Place screen such as the mock up to the left would greatly assist users and allow the change of all instances in one simple operation and extract Cottage Hospital into Place Details field. (Click image to enlarge)

Both the Place and Place Details can be GeoCoded and Rootsmagic will usually GeoCode a general Place automatically providing it has been entered in a correct and recognizable format. Place Details on the other hand have to be GeoCoded manually as these could be the location of a hospital or Church or even as specific as a grave location, yes that's right they get pretty accurate. In addition both the Place and Place Details can have Notes and Media attached, so in Place Details you could have a picture and description of an old family homestead and the precise location of where the homestead or building was located and any other description necessary.

Rootsmagic could also provide some further help here in allowing users to set their preference of online mapping program to locate the latitude and longitude information. This could be behind a GeoCode button on the Edit Place Details window. Having found that information allowing direct copy and paste of common formats such as the Google Maps "What's Here?" format of 41.7201,-73.899622 would also be a great time saver. To obtain this geocode information from Google Maps, first locate the site, zoom in on it for accuracy then right click on the location. In the dropdown list selcts "What's Here?", an arrow will appear on the map and the latitude and logitude will appear in the search box above. (Click image to enlarge)

Rootsmagic currently provides no easy indication that Media attachments to Place Details exists without clicking on the Media button for every Place Details which would take a very long time. Reversing Places so they display geographically exists in some current reports and this would also be a great aid when working through the Rootsmagic Place List.(click image to enlarge)

In my opinion at least something like my mock up on the left is probably what is needed here to cover these two points and bring all Place information onto one screen.

In future upgrades of the software when GeoCoding of Place Details is fully integrated the possibilities become even more interesting.

Say you are planning a research trip to another State or even Country, you might be going to visit the war graves of Europe or even the lush green countryside of Ireland.

Well all those carefully GeoCoded Place Details could now become very useful. A program such as Rootsmagic should be able to easily create a POI database for loading onto your Sat Nav. Then you can navigate easily from site to site without those old fashioned maps.

Another feature which would be easily developed from GeoCoding and especially the GeoCoding of Place Details is a Proximity Search. Currently if you were looking for events around Narrowsburg, PA then you would search for places containing PA, Pennsylvania, NY, New York, Narrowsburg, Delaware, Beach Lake etc. etc.

With all Place Details GeoCoded then Rootsmagic by applying a bit of math could do a Proximity Search of any point on earth for events which took place. Rootsmagic could allow the user to select any Place Details or specify co-ordinates then specify the radius of the search.

I find proximity a really useful clue to family ties and believe this would be a really useful enhancement.

A user of RM who is very adept at creating SQLite queries to produce reports which RM does not currently include has produced this report. The report is impressive in showing all events within a certain user defined radius and is exactly what RM should be trying to incorporate into Rootsmagic in my opinion. (click image to enlarge)

Visit Toms WiKi on using SQLite to query the Rootsmagic database by clicking this link and view the various queries he has produced so far. You will also find download links to various SQLite Managers many of which are FREE so if you want to start creating queries for yourself, Toms site is a valuable resource.