Custom Places — Advanced

The Places panel (accessed from the map-pin icon on the Action Bar) provides full control over how places are handled in Pedigree Forge. In addition to adding custom places so they are recognised, you can configure how each place appears in reports and charts.

Custom place properties

Select a place in the Places panel to edit its properties:

Type

Override the place type to control how it is categorised. This affects how the place is described in narrative reports.

Never fold county

By default, Pedigree Forge may abbreviate or omit the county name after a place has been mentioned in full. Check Never fold county to ensure the county is always included — useful for places whose name alone is ambiguous.

Always drop county

The opposite of "never fold" — the county is always omitted from formatted output. Useful for very well-known places where the county adds no information (e.g. a major city).

Preposition

Controls the preposition used before the place name in narrative text. Most places use "in" (e.g. "born in Ashford, Kent"), but some are better expressed with "at" or another preposition. Select from the standard options or leave blank for the default.

Coordinates

Latitude and longitude can be entered for a place. These are used by spatial queries (e.g. WITHIN 10 MILES OF) and may be used for future mapping features.

Wikidata ID

A Wikidata identifier can be linked to a place for reference and potential enrichment of place data.

Place formatting in reports

The properties above work together to control how places appear in narrative reports:

• First mention: full place name including county (unless "always drop county" is set)
• Subsequent mentions: county may be folded/omitted for brevity (unless "never fold county" is set)
• Preposition: used in phrases like "born in…" or "married at…"
• Disambiguated places (those with square-bracket identifiers) have the brackets stripped in report and chart output

The built-in place database

Pedigree Forge ships with a place database covering:

• England, Scotland, and Wales — comprehensive coverage of towns, villages, and parishes with their historic counties
• International — selected well-known places worldwide

The database is updated with new releases. Places not in the database can be added as custom places and will behave identically to built-in entries.

Custom place and facet CSV files

For adding many places at once, you can provide CSV files containing place data. Pedigree Forge loads custom place files from %APPDATA%\Pedigree Forge\places on Windows (or ~/Library/Application Support/Pedigree Forge/places on macOS).

Facets are short descriptive phrases associated with places — for example, "market town" or "cathedral city". Custom facet CSV files are loaded from %APPDATA%\Pedigree Forge\facets on Windows (or ~/Library/Application Support/Pedigree Forge/facets on macOS).