Place Research by FamilySearch

It is impossible to understate the importance of identifying the exact place where events occurred in your ancestors' lives. Names are unreliable identifiers. Dates are often vague and/or inaccurate. Places associated with an exact location on the face of the earth give you a firm starting point for valid research. Can I say that any more emphatically? The very first step in identifying an ancestor or other relative should be to focus on the places where events may have occurred in their lives.

Now, this takes us to maps. One relatively obscure feature of the FamilySearch.org website is the Places Research web page. For example, the web page does not show up on the website's Site Map and there are no obvious links to the web page. It does show up in the FamilySearch Solutions Gallery as an app.

The web page does have a number of search options as shown by this screenshot:

Why is this helpful? One reason is that the Standardized Places used by the FamilySearch.org Family Tree are tied to specific geographical coordinates and you can see those coordinates used by searching for the standard place names using Place Research web page. You can also use the Place Resarch web page to see any places that are included within a particular location such as all the counties in a state or place names within a county.

One example of why exact place names and descriptions are important is illustrated by this screenshot:

If your ancestor was from "Arizona" you might think that is fairly obvious what place is being referred to. But if you look at the map above, you can see many places in the world that are called by the name "Arizona" including six in the United States. This is a very simple example but place names and locations can become a major issue in deciding where to search for an ancestor.

In addition, place names change over time. Fortunately, FamilySearch is taking the initiative to provide time frames for the use of some place names. This is particularly true when standardizing a place name while using the Family Tree.

There are a huge number of other tools that can be used to establish the location of an event and these should not be overlooked. I write about maps and location finding devices and tools from time to time so stay tuned for further posts.