Geolocations

[Paul Blair]

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

Paul

[Hugh Watkins]

Paul Blair wrote:

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

Paul

any

either put them on notes

or invent new fact fields in FTM 2006 for example


Hugh W

[lenni]

Paul Blair wrote:

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

If I understand the question correctly, TMG allows you to store
Lat/Long. Here is what the online help says:
"For example: "361614N0823529W" is 36 degrees, 16 minutes, 14 seconds
north latitude and 82 degrees, 35 minutes, 29 seconds west longitude"

Not quite what you were looking for, but ...

Kathleen

[Paul Blair]

lenni wrote:

Paul Blair wrote:
Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

If I understand the question correctly, TMG allows you to store
Lat/Long. Here is what the online help says:
"For example: "361614N0823529W" is 36 degrees, 16 minutes, 14 seconds
north latitude and 82 degrees, 35 minutes, 29 seconds west longitude"

Not quite what you were looking for, but ...

Kathleen

Thank you both.

They need to be properly exportable as
LATI
LONG

I can't import the geoloc file for the Pacific area from Legacy to try -
the link is broken. And the Legacy database table is password protected,
so I can't (officially) mess with that.

Paul

[Paul Blair]

Bob Velke wrote:

Kathleen said:

If I understand the question correctly, TMG allows you to store
Lat/Long. Here is what the online help says:
"For example: "361614N0823529W" is 36 degrees, 16 minutes, 14 seconds
north latitude and 82 degrees, 35 minutes, 29 seconds west longitude"

Not quite what you were looking for, but ...

The Master Genealogist (TMG) will also recognize the decimal values
"36.270556N 82.591389W" as equivalent to the degrees, minutes, and
seconds in your example.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com

Will it handle + and - in place of N, S, E and W?

Paul

[Paul Blair]

Bob Velke wrote:

Paul said:

Will [TMG] handle + and - in place of N, S, E and W?

Yes, it will interpret "+" (or an unsigned decimal) as N and E and it
will interpret "-" as S and W.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com

Thanks Bob. Does it export as LATI and LONG?

Paul

[Bob Velke]

Kathleen said:

If I understand the question correctly, TMG allows you to store
Lat/Long. Here is what the online help says:
"For example: "361614N0823529W" is 36 degrees, 16 minutes, 14 seconds
north latitude and 82 degrees, 35 minutes, 29 seconds west longitude"

Not quite what you were looking for, but ...

The Master Genealogist (TMG) will also recognize the decimal values
"36.270556N 82.591389W" as equivalent to the degrees, minutes, and seconds
in your example.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com


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[Bob Velke]

Paul said:

Will [TMG] handle + and - in place of N, S, E and W?

Yes, it will interpret "+" (or an unsigned decimal) as N and E and it will
interpret "-" as S and W.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com


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[Patrick Texier]

Le Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:37:56 +1000, Paul Blair <[email protected]> a
écrit :

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

Legacy use :

0 @I1@ INDI
1 NAME John /Smith/
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 1900
2 PLAC London, England
0 _PLAC_DEFN
1 PLAC London, England
2 ABBR London, England
2 MAP
3 LATI N51,5
3 LONG W,166666666666667

Cumberland Family Tree, my main program, use only notes (but stored in
places table) :

2 PLAC London, England
3 NOTE Latitude: 51°30' N
3 NOTE Longitude: 00°10' W

With Lifelines, I'm using an other record (PLace DeFinition) :

0 @X662@ PLDF
1 REFN London, England
1 PLAC London, England
2 LAT1 51°30N
2 LON1 00°10W
2 LAT2 51;30;0
2 LON2 -00;10;0

Since 3.0.50, LifeLines has a new great circle distance calculation :
spdist unsing Deg/Min/Sec format.
--
Patrick Texier

free GP (F1 and others) results database (french language)
<http://www.gpsql.org>

[Bob Velke]

Paul said:

Will [TMG] handle + and - in place of N, S, E and W?

Yes, it will interpret "+" (or an unsigned decimal) as N and E and it
will interpret "-" as S and W.
Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com

Thanks Bob. Does it export as LATI and LONG?

I'm afraid not. And neither does any other program that conforms to the
GEDCOM 5.5 specs.

GEDCOM 5.5.1 has tags for LATI and LONG but it was only released as a draft
and was never certified by the LDS for public use. In fact, they
specifically stated that "It must not be used for programming of
genealogical software while in draft." So we don't.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software


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[Dave Hinz]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:37:56 +1000, Paul Blair <[email protected]> wrote:

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

I always just put the GPS coordinates in the notes section as text. You
didn't ask, but I also will give a direction/distance from a landmark
that is likely to stay visible for a long time - "20 feet north, and 10
feet east, of the tall spire headstone with the eagle on top" for
instance. The GPS gets 'em to the right section of the cemetary, and
the landmark gets 'em to the right stone.

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On 20 Jun 2006 13:54:29 GMT, Dave Hinz <[email protected]> declaimed
the following in soc.genealogy.computing:

I always just put the GPS coordinates in the notes section as text. You
didn't ask, but I also will give a direction/distance from a landmark
that is likely to stay visible for a long time - "20 feet north, and 10
feet east, of the tall spire headstone with the eagle on top" for
instance. The GPS gets 'em to the right section of the cemetary, and
the landmark gets 'em to the right stone.

UTM coordinates would let you combine the two effects in one.

Supply the GPS UTM coordinates of the landmark item -- and if you
get the readings for the other spots in a fairly quick session (before
the satellite configuration has changed -- so the error will tend to be
in the same direction) the difference between coordinates will be
east/north in meters.

Of course, you should still record the datum used, and true or
magnetic north...
--
bieber.genealogy Dennis Lee Bieber
HTTP://home.earthlink.net/~bieber.genealogy/

[Paul Blair]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

On 20 Jun 2006 13:54:29 GMT, Dave Hinz <[email protected]> declaimed
the following in soc.genealogy.computing:

I always just put the GPS coordinates in the notes section as text. You
didn't ask, but I also will give a direction/distance from a landmark
that is likely to stay visible for a long time - "20 feet north, and 10
feet east, of the tall spire headstone with the eagle on top" for
instance. The GPS gets 'em to the right section of the cemetary, and
the landmark gets 'em to the right stone.

UTM coordinates would let you combine the two effects in one.

Supply the GPS UTM coordinates of the landmark item -- and if you
get the readings for the other spots in a fairly quick session (before
the satellite configuration has changed -- so the error will tend to be
in the same direction) the difference between coordinates will be
east/north in meters.

Of course, you should still record the datum used, and true or
magnetic north...

Hmmmm...all interesting stuff. Thank you to the contributors.

With Google maps now so easy to link to, I guess someone will make an
attempt at a "correct" implementation in the not too distant future,
GEDCOM spec or not.

Paul

[Paul Blair]

Bob Velke wrote:

Paul said:

Hmmmm...all interesting stuff. Thank you to the contributors.

With Google maps now so easy to link to, I guess someone will make an
attempt at a "correct" implementation in the not too distant future,
GEDCOM spec or not.

TMG has had that feature for a year and a half. When looking at a
place, just click on a button a see a map from Mapquest, Maporama,
Topozone, TerraServer, or others. Or click on a different button to get
detailed information about the place (population, altitude, nicknames,
etc.) from an online gazetteer like the U.S. Geographic Names
Information Service, U.S. Census Bureau, GEOnet names server, and other
international services.

If you've entered Lat/Long data then it uses that, otherwise it uses the
place name -- all without an export to GEDCOM or anything else.

Both features (maps and gazetteers) use a documented template system so
it is easy to add support for other online sites. To use Google Maps,
for instance, just open placemap.ini in a text editor and add these lines:

[Site]
Name="Google Maps by place name"
Description="Find a map for this place from Google Maps"
Condition="[countryabbrev]='US' AND NOT
EMPTY([countryabbrev]+[detail]+[city]+[stateabbrev])"
URL="http://maps.google.com/?q=[detail]+[city]+[stateabbrev]"

Thereafter, you can click on the button inside the program to
automatically show you a map of the place from Google Maps.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com




Very neat. But I'm trying to do away with the intermediate step of using

a lookup, which Lat and Long allows. Google Map doesn't know the names
of a lot of places out here...

Paul

[Bob Velke]

Paul said:

Hmmmm...all interesting stuff. Thank you to the contributors.

With Google maps now so easy to link to, I guess someone will make an
attempt at a "correct" implementation in the not too distant future,
GEDCOM spec or not.

TMG has had that feature for a year and a half. When looking at a place,
just click on a button a see a map from Mapquest, Maporama, Topozone,
TerraServer, or others. Or click on a different button to get detailed
information about the place (population, altitude, nicknames, etc.) from an
online gazetteer like the U.S. Geographic Names Information Service, U.S.
Census Bureau, GEOnet names server, and other international services.

If you've entered Lat/Long data then it uses that, otherwise it uses the
place name -- all without an export to GEDCOM or anything else.

Both features (maps and gazetteers) use a documented template system so it
is easy to add support for other online sites. To use Google Maps, for
instance, just open placemap.ini in a text editor and add these lines:

[Site]
Name="Google Maps by place name"
Description="Find a map for this place from Google Maps"
Condition="[countryabbrev]='US' AND NOT
EMPTY([countryabbrev]+[detail]+[city]+[stateabbrev])"
URL="http://maps.google.com/?q=[detail]+[city]+[stateabbrev]"

Thereafter, you can click on the button inside the program to automatically
show you a map of the place from Google Maps.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com




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[Paul Blair]

Bob Velke wrote:

Paul said:

Very neat. But I'm trying to do away with the intermediate step of
using a lookup, which Lat and Long allows. Google Map doesn't know the
names of a lot of places out here...

Mine was just an example. The template system will let you use any site
that lets you pass the place name or lat/long as arguments.

To use lat/long with Google Maps, you'd enter this in placemap.ini:

[Site]
Name="Google Maps by Lat/Long"
Description="Find a map with Google Maps using latitude and longitude"
Condition="NOT EMPTY([latlong])"
URL="http://maps.google.com/?q=[latitude]+[longitude]"

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com

Is there an example on your web site?

Paul

[Bob Velke]

Paul said:

Very neat. But I'm trying to do away with the intermediate step of using a
lookup, which Lat and Long allows. Google Map doesn't know the names of a
lot of places out here...

Mine was just an example. The template system will let you use any site
that lets you pass the place name or lat/long as arguments.

To use lat/long with Google Maps, you'd enter this in placemap.ini:

[Site]
Name="Google Maps by Lat/Long"
Description="Find a map with Google Maps using latitude and longitude"
Condition="NOT EMPTY([latlong])"
URL="http://maps.google.com/?q=[latitude]+[longitude]"

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com


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[Bob Velke]

Paul said:

Is there an example on your web site?

There is not an example of a Google Map on our web site, no.

You can download a 30-day fully-functioning free trial, however.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com


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[Hugh Watkins]

Bob Velke wrote:

Paul said:

Is there an example on your web site?


There is not an example of a Google Map on our web site, no.

You can download a 30-day fully-functioning free trial, however.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software
http://www.WhollyGenes.com

I just blog link to google maps by entering a UK post code and copy

pasteing the "link to this map" url

http://slim2005.blogspot.com/

uses

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=B ... 4&t=h&om=1


put in B37 5BX and you can see where I live

the google map shows trees growing on the old railway

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=& ... 4,0.004957

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=& ... 008926&t=h


enjoy

Hugh W

[Jack]

Hi!

Get Bt gps from http://www.nav4all.com/site2/www.nav4al ... g/shop.php
And Legacy from: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/Index.asp?mid=4A17Nvi


"Paul Blair" <[email protected]> kirjoitti
viestissä:[email protected]...

lenni wrote:
Paul Blair wrote:
Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

If I understand the question correctly, TMG allows you to store
Lat/Long. Here is what the online help says:
"For example: "361614N0823529W" is 36 degrees, 16 minutes, 14 seconds
north latitude and 82 degrees, 35 minutes, 29 seconds west longitude"

Not quite what you were looking for, but ...

Kathleen


Thank you both.

They need to be properly exportable as
LATI
LONG

I can't import the geoloc file for the Pacific area from Legacy to try -
the link is broken. And the Legacy database table is password protected,
so I can't (officially) mess with that.

Paul

[Kerry Raymond]

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

Paul,

What exactly are you trying to do?

I've been toying with the following idea (for what it's worth) to take GPS
information in my family history database and display it using Google Earth
(rather than GoogleMaps).

Here's what I was thinking.

Add the GPS data for events at the end of the place name for the event using
"#GPS" or some pattern of characters that doesn't naturally occur in my
place names to make it easy to find the place names with GPS data.

Name: John Smith
Birth place: 123 Main Street, Sometown #GPS 113.234324 -23.23432423

Then generate a GED for some branch of the family. Then run a script over
the GED to find the placenames with GPS data (i.e. with "#GPS") and then
construct a KMZ file (for use with GoogleEarth) with placemarkers for each
of the GPS-tagged places with each one appropriately labelled, e.g. Birth of
John Smith, Death of Mary Brown

It should be relatively straightforward to process the GED file in a
one-pass script to extract the information you need to make placemarkers for
individual events like births and deaths. But it would not be so
straightfoward to process the GED to extract information related to places
for marriages, as you would have to lookup the names of the individuals
involved. But some kind of 2-pass approach might work.

Another complication would be disambiguation of people with similar names.
If you have lots of John Smiths, it would be nice to label the places in KMZ
as "Birth of John Smith (1900-1980)" or "Birth of John Smith, son of Thomas
Smith and Betty Brown", but again this would be a lot trickier to do. I am
hoping to do all this with a text processing tools like awk or sed (under
Linux) rather than have to write a program to parse GED and interpret it the
whole data model.

If you were prepared to interpret the whole data model, there would be some
neat stuff you could do like show a route from a person's place of birth to
place of death traversing the other places in their life in chronological
order along the way (e.g. residences). This might be a bit too tricky to do
just with text processing.

Once my uni exams are finished, I'll have time to give this a try.

Kerry

[Dale DePriest]

Garry wrote:

Paul Blair wrote:

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

Paul


Paul FamilyView Stores Lat Long in Decimal Degrees in Place Names
ie
Ottawa ON Canada
42.45 : -75.6946
(North) (West)

Family View has a map that Will Display these points

Maps with Name Labels and list of People (events) will be available
Late Fall 2006

I do not understand the idea of place names for lat/lon values. Places
are so big! Legacy had lat/lon in events but moved it to place names. I
would much prefer it in individual events so theat it could be more
precise. Knowing the lat/lon of a cemetary doesn't get you very close to
a grave and when you have more than one person in a place where do you
put them? Georeference should be in residence, burial, and other precise
places identified in events. The city names should be more generic.

My two cents.
Dale

Garry

--
_ _ Dale DePriest
/`) _ // http://users.cwnet.com/dalede
o/_/ (_(_X_(` For GPS and GPS/PDAs

[Paul Blair]

Dale DePriest wrote:

Garry wrote:
Paul Blair wrote:

Can folk please advise me which family tree applications allow you to
store geolocations (lat, long) preferably in decimal format?

Paul


Paul FamilyView Stores Lat Long in Decimal Degrees in Place Names
ie
Ottawa ON Canada
42.45 : -75.6946
(North) (West)

Family View has a map that Will Display these points

Maps with Name Labels and list of People (events) will be available
Late Fall 2006

I do not understand the idea of place names for lat/lon values. Places
are so big! Legacy had lat/lon in events but moved it to place names. I
would much prefer it in individual events so theat it could be more
precise. Knowing the lat/lon of a cemetary doesn't get you very close to
a grave and when you have more than one person in a place where do you
put them? Georeference should be in residence, burial, and other precise
places identified in events. The city names should be more generic.

My two cents.
Dale

Garry

I accept that there is not a lot of accuracy in the way I'm doing this.
I store lat/long to 3 decimal places, so (at best) I'm 30 metres from
the exact spot. And, when it comes to a cemetery, I'm not interested in
that degree of accuracy.

For many people, I don't know enough to try to pinpoint the spot where
the event happened. Nor do I want to. Just as I don't know a lot of
exact event dates.

If someone is born in Shoreditch or Raleigh NC or the South Pole,
showing broadly where that is is fine. My map is 600px by 400px, so the
resolution is less than best. But for my gt-uncle buried out on the
farm, 150km from the nearest town, I'm happy with what I can show.

Paul

[Kerry Raymond]

I think there are a couple of points here.

Firstly, the desire is to have latitude/longitude in addition to the normal
place information. Nobody is wanting to take away the ability to have a town
name or a street address. However, place names change. Therefore, it is
useful to augment place name information with a set of numeric coordinates
that will identify a spot long after the place name has changed.

As for how precise the coordinates are, that depends on how digits you use
and how precise you can get with the technology you are using (e.g. a map or
GPS). While GPS officially has an accuracy of about 10 metres, in practice
most of the time the accuracy is 1-3 metres, which is quite adequate to
identify the location of a house, but not a grave.

I've certainly spent a lot of time scouring old maps and driving/walking
about an area in the hope of finding some location connected with family
history. When I find something, I know routinely try to mark its location
with GPS. The next step (from my point of view) is finding a good solution
to publishing this information so others can benefit. Clearly locations
specific to my own family history (e.g. a house) can be put recorded in my
Family Tree Maker database and exported to GED (to exchange with other
family members), but for locations of interest to a wider community, e.g. an
abandoned cemetery, a street with a changed name, we don't really have a
registry on the WWW for publishing that information.

Kerry

[Dale DePriest]

Kerry Raymond wrote:

I think there are a couple of points here.

Firstly, the desire is to have latitude/longitude in addition to the normal
place information. Nobody is wanting to take away the ability to have a town
name or a street address. However, place names change. Therefore, it is
useful to augment place name information with a set of numeric coordinates
that will identify a spot long after the place name has changed.

As for how precise the coordinates are, that depends on how digits you use
and how precise you can get with the technology you are using (e.g. a map or
GPS). While GPS officially has an accuracy of about 10 metres, in practice
most of the time the accuracy is 1-3 metres, which is quite adequate to
identify the location of a house, but not a grave.

I've certainly spent a lot of time scouring old maps and driving/walking
about an area in the hope of finding some location connected with family
history. When I find something, I know routinely try to mark its location
with GPS. The next step (from my point of view) is finding a good solution
to publishing this information so others can benefit. Clearly locations
specific to my own family history (e.g. a house) can be put recorded in my
Family Tree Maker database and exported to GED (to exchange with other
family members), but for locations of interest to a wider community, e.g. an
abandoned cemetery, a street with a changed name, we don't really have a
registry on the WWW for publishing that information.

Kerry

I agree with you accuracy information. My only problem is a place entry
in my database is used for lots of people and lots of events. If I can
only make an entry for one place I either have to have a huge number of
places or I have to compromise my location data. That is why I want
lat/lon tied to events and not places.

Dale

--
_ _ Dale DePriest
/`) _ // http://users.cwnet.com/dalede
o/_/ (_(_X_(` For GPS and GPS/PDAs

[Paul Blair]

Dale DePriest wrote:

Kerry Raymond wrote:

I think there are a couple of points here.

Firstly, the desire is to have latitude/longitude in addition to the
normal place information. Nobody is wanting to take away the ability
to have a town name or a street address. However, place names change.
Therefore, it is useful to augment place name information with a set
of numeric coordinates that will identify a spot long after the place
name has changed.

As for how precise the coordinates are, that depends on how digits you
use and how precise you can get with the technology you are using
(e.g. a map or GPS). While GPS officially has an accuracy of about 10
metres, in practice most of the time the accuracy is 1-3 metres, which
is quite adequate to identify the location of a house, but not a grave.

I've certainly spent a lot of time scouring old maps and
driving/walking about an area in the hope of finding some location
connected with family history. When I find something, I know routinely
try to mark its location with GPS. The next step (from my point of
view) is finding a good solution to publishing this information so
others can benefit. Clearly locations specific to my own family
history (e.g. a house) can be put recorded in my Family Tree Maker
database and exported to GED (to exchange with other family members),
but for locations of interest to a wider community, e.g. an abandoned
cemetery, a street with a changed name, we don't really have a
registry on the WWW for publishing that information.

Kerry




I agree with you accuracy information. My only problem is a place entry
in my database is used for lots of people and lots of events. If I can
only make an entry for one place I either have to have a huge number of
places or I have to compromise my location data. That is why I want
lat/lon tied to events and not places.

Dale

You're probably correct, but hardly feasible. We just don't have that
sort of info, for the most part. For example, my mum was born in
Milligan Street, Perth. Not a long street, but today most of it is a
carpark. If I put a point in the middle of the road halfway along its
length, that's all I can do. That ties it to the event and the place,
but is not perfect. However, I'm satisfied with the result. And when
Milligan St vanishes under a block of units, as it surely will, the spot
is sufficiently identified.

Paul

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 09:11:09 +1000, "Kerry Raymond"
<[email protected]> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

As for how precise the coordinates are, that depends on how digits you use
and how precise you can get with the technology you are using (e.g. a map or
GPS). While GPS officially has an accuracy of about 10 metres, in practice
most of the time the accuracy is 1-3 metres, which is quite adequate to
identify the location of a house, but not a grave.

However, if you get a reading of some significant landmark that is

nearby, and use UTM coordinates... Then measure the locations of the
graves of interest in a relatively short period of time -- so the GPS
spacecraft geometry doesn't change much -- the UTM coordinate
differences will give you measurements in terms of x-meters North,
y-meters East (negative for south/west) of the reference landmark.

Some GPS units also incorporated an "averaging mode", where you
leave the unit running on one spot for an hour or so; it averages out
the drift resulting from spacecraft geometry, giving a "truer" (in terms
of plotting on a map) reading.

Having two GPS units, and an assistant, could make things even more
accurate -- as a poor-man's differential GPS. Put the two units at the
landmark and check for UTM errors; if consistant make a notation. The
use one to read each grave (save waypoint), having the assistant do the
same on the landmark unit at the same time. Since drift from
constellation geometry changes should affect both units similarly, the
UTM difference between the two readings should be very accurate.

--
bieber.genealogy Dennis Lee Bieber
HTTP://home.earthlink.net/~bieber.genealogy/

[Dale DePriest]

Paul Blair wrote:

Dale DePriest wrote:



Kerry Raymond wrote:

I think there are a couple of points here.

Firstly, the desire is to have latitude/longitude in addition to the
normal place information. Nobody is wanting to take away the ability
to have a town name or a street address. However, place names change.
Therefore, it is useful to augment place name information with a set
of numeric coordinates that will identify a spot long after the place
name has changed.

As for how precise the coordinates are, that depends on how digits
you use and how precise you can get with the technology you are using
(e.g. a map or GPS). While GPS officially has an accuracy of about 10
metres, in practice most of the time the accuracy is 1-3 metres,
which is quite adequate to identify the location of a house, but not
a grave.

I've certainly spent a lot of time scouring old maps and
driving/walking about an area in the hope of finding some location
connected with family history. When I find something, I know
routinely try to mark its location with GPS. The next step (from my
point of view) is finding a good solution to publishing this
information so others can benefit. Clearly locations specific to my
own family history (e.g. a house) can be put recorded in my Family
Tree Maker database and exported to GED (to exchange with other
family members), but for locations of interest to a wider community,
e.g. an abandoned cemetery, a street with a changed name, we don't
really have a registry on the WWW for publishing that information.

Kerry




I agree with you accuracy information. My only problem is a place
entry in my database is used for lots of people and lots of events. If
I can only make an entry for one place I either have to have a huge
number of places or I have to compromise my location data. That is why
I want lat/lon tied to events and not places.

Dale


You're probably correct, but hardly feasible. We just don't have that
sort of info, for the most part. For example, my mum was born in
Milligan Street, Perth. Not a long street, but today most of it is a
carpark. If I put a point in the middle of the road halfway along its
length, that's all I can do. That ties it to the event and the place,
but is not perfect. However, I'm satisfied with the result. And when
Milligan St vanishes under a block of units, as it surely will, the spot
is sufficiently identified.

Paul

I don't understand the comment hardly feasible. Certainly it is not
feasible to record lat/lon values for every event in the database but
that does not mean you should not for those you can. Nor does it mean
there is no value in doing so. That is why I want a program that will
keep track of lat/lon per event although per place could also be added
for backup. The only problem is, so far, all I have found will only do
it for places. An earlier legacy did it for events but then they
abandoned it. Once you start getting some decent lat/lon values then
mapping the data starts becoming feasible.

Dale
--
_ _ Dale DePriest
/`) _ // http://users.cwnet.com/dalede
o/_/ (_(_X_(` For GPS and GPS/PDAs

[Paul Blair]

Dale DePriest wrote:

Paul Blair wrote:

Dale DePriest wrote:



Kerry Raymond wrote:

I think there are a couple of points here.

Firstly, the desire is to have latitude/longitude in addition to the
normal place information. Nobody is wanting to take away the ability
to have a town name or a street address. However, place names
change. Therefore, it is useful to augment place name information
with a set of numeric coordinates that will identify a spot long
after the place name has changed.

As for how precise the coordinates are, that depends on how digits
you use and how precise you can get with the technology you are
using (e.g. a map or GPS). While GPS officially has an accuracy of
about 10 metres, in practice most of the time the accuracy is 1-3
metres, which is quite adequate to identify the location of a house,
but not a grave.

I've certainly spent a lot of time scouring old maps and
driving/walking about an area in the hope of finding some location
connected with family history. When I find something, I know
routinely try to mark its location with GPS. The next step (from my
point of view) is finding a good solution to publishing this
information so others can benefit. Clearly locations specific to my
own family history (e.g. a house) can be put recorded in my Family
Tree Maker database and exported to GED (to exchange with other
family members), but for locations of interest to a wider community,
e.g. an abandoned cemetery, a street with a changed name, we don't
really have a registry on the WWW for publishing that information.

Kerry




I agree with you accuracy information. My only problem is a place
entry in my database is used for lots of people and lots of events.
If I can only make an entry for one place I either have to have a
huge number of places or I have to compromise my location data. That
is why I want lat/lon tied to events and not places.

Dale


You're probably correct, but hardly feasible. We just don't have that
sort of info, for the most part. For example, my mum was born in
Milligan Street, Perth. Not a long street, but today most of it is a
carpark. If I put a point in the middle of the road halfway along its
length, that's all I can do. That ties it to the event and the place,
but is not perfect. However, I'm satisfied with the result. And when
Milligan St vanishes under a block of units, as it surely will, the
spot is sufficiently identified.

Paul

I don't understand the comment hardly feasible. Certainly it is not
feasible to record lat/lon values for every event in the database but
that does not mean you should not for those you can. Nor does it mean
there is no value in doing so. That is why I want a program that will
keep track of lat/lon per event although per place could also be added
for backup. The only problem is, so far, all I have found will only do
it for places. An earlier legacy did it for events but then they
abandoned it. Once you start getting some decent lat/lon values then
mapping the data starts becoming feasible.

Dale

Dale:

Sorry, I may have misread what you say. But my point is that locations
in this environment are all a compromise...I pick a point roughly in the
middle of cemeteries, I spy via Google Earth for buildings, but 95% of
the time I have to be "about" correct. And I can live with that...

Paul

[Kerry Raymond]

However, if you get a reading of some significant landmark that is
nearby, and use UTM coordinates... Then measure the locations of the
graves of interest in a relatively short period of time -- so the GPS
spacecraft geometry doesn't change much -- the UTM coordinate
differences will give you measurements in terms of x-meters North,
y-meters East (negative for south/west) of the reference landmark.

Some GPS units also incorporated an "averaging mode", where you
leave the unit running on one spot for an hour or so; it averages out
the drift resulting from spacecraft geometry, giving a "truer" (in terms
of plotting on a map) reading.

Having two GPS units, and an assistant, could make things even more
accurate -- as a poor-man's differential GPS.

Alas, we only have one GPS unit so differential GPS is out.

But in our case, we are recording all headstones in a cemetery, so we also
have the practical problem of having to do everything very efficiently. So,
for the cemeteries we record where we typically have 100 - 1000 headstones,
we currently just take a GPS reading at the approximate centre of the
cemetery. If the cemetery is not currently beside a road (which usually
means it's in the middle of a field), we also take a GPS reading of the
gate, driveway, or closest spot on a road to the cemetery, with a view to
helping other people find the cemetery. So, even if we had a GPS unit with
sufficient accuracy to mark a grave, we'd still have the issue of how to
efficiently mark each one (with sufficient info to correctly link the
location with the photo). My dream is a digital camera with a GPS where the
GPS data is put into the meta-data on the photo, so every photo
automatically records the location of the camera (and ideally the direction
the camera is pointing). Now I believe such cameras exist but are way out of
my price range. There is a HP PDA which has a camera and GPS, but the camera
is relatively low-resolution and also I can't find any documentation on it
that suggests that the GPS data is captured and recorded in the photos.

Lately I've taken to walking the boundaries of the cemetery and capturing
the GPS track from that, with a view to publishing not just the centre point
of the cemetery but also the boundaries. However, I need to update to a paid
version of Google Earth (not a big cost admittedly) so I can upload the
track data into Google Earth.

Kerry