Describing where an event took place consists of two parts: the place (which is the town/village etc.) and the address (the actual house, farm or street address). Pedigree Forge follows this convention, and allows both to be entered when creating events.
The address is usually only shown in detailed reports, whereas the place is usually shown on charts too (charts generally only contain a summary of information).
In the example below, Luddenham, Kent, is the “place” and Oare Mill, is the address:
Pedigree Forge will accept any value in the places field, although it will warn you if it doesn’t understand the place, or it isn’t in its database (yet).
The recommended way to enter places (and the way that they are suggested by the auto-complete) is as two parts: the town or village, then a comma, then the county/region/state/department eg:
Ashford, Kent
They can also be entered with the country on the end too:
Ashford, Kent, England
Pedigree Forge knows that Kent is in England, and so can infer the country, without it being entered. However, both will be accepted in the place fields, and one won’t be changed to the other, so will remain as you prefer.
It is not sufficient to just use Ashford, England because there is more than one Ashford in England.
Once you have used a place which is recognised, this will be the top-auto completed suggestion when you begin to type the stem in other place boxes during the session whilst you are using Pedigree Forge. Other suggestions will be shown below in a drop down list:
If Pedigree Forge doesn’t recognise a place (it isn’t in its database), it will appear in red:
Usually, the name of the town or village, together with the county, is enough to identify a place uniquely. However, some counties contain more than one town or village with the same name. In these cases, a long-standing local convention often provides a fuller version of the name. For example, in the county of Kent there are two places named Goodnestone: one known as Goodnestone-next-Wingham and the other as Goodnestone-next-Faversham. In such situations, choose the unambiguous name. For places already in the built-in database, Pedigree Forge will usually have the context needed to use the full name the first time it appears in a chapter, and then shorten it thereafter.
Occasionally, however, no established local convention exists. To ensure the correct place can still be identified, an artificial identifier is added in square brackets after the name. These identifiers exist solely to distinguish places internally, as no proper local naming convention is available. For such places, the text within the square brackets is shown only in the Pedigree Forge user interface and is omitted from charts and reports. As an example: Blackwater [mainland], Hampshire and Blackwater [IoW], Hampshire, will both show as such in the user interface, but will appear in reports and charts as Blackwater, Hampshire.