Places (L)

A place is a property indicating a physical location associated with an event, and generally provided with a postal address and capable of receiving geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude).

In the Gedcom standard, a place is defined by the PLAC tag.

Place jurisdictions

The value of a place is presented as address elements separated by commas, such as a postal address.

Example (tag and value)PLAC Hyde Park,02136,Boston,Suffolk,Massachusetts,New England,USA

PLAC Hyde Park,02136,Boston,Suffolk,Massachusetts,New England,USA

These elements of the place are called jurisdictions. A jurisdiction, also called a place criteria, is therefore a constitutive element of a place: the city, the postal code, the region, the country, etc.

In the example above, the jurisdictions are: neighborhood, postal code, city, county, state, region, country.

In the Gedcom standard, the different jurisdictions of a place are organized from left to right, separated by commas, and in increasing order of administrative importance.

The following example, which indicates the jurisdictions in random order, would not be compliant with the Gedcom standard.

PLAC USA,Suffolk,Massachusetts,02136,New England,Hyde Park,Boston

The Gedcom standard allows you to define your own jurisdictions. We can indeed define the parish or neighborhood level for example, or have two codes within the city: the ZIP or Postal code and the Census units.

How to use the comma

​In the Gedcom standard, the comma is the separating element making it possible to distinguish the different jurisdictions of a place.

If one of the jurisdictions of a place is unknown, an empty space will be left to materialize this jurisdiction.

For example, in the absence of neighborhood and ZIP code, the place of Boston mentioned above would take the following form:

PLAC ,,Boston,Suffolk,Massachusetts,New England,USA

The initial two successive commas indicate the locations of the two unspecified jurisdictions (neighborhood and ZIP code).

For a good understanding when reading a place, it is therefore essential to respect the location of the commas, and obviously not to use a comma within a jurisdiction.

Please note that the Gedcom file does not accept any blanks. on either side of these commas.

• For example, the city of New York keeps its white space between New and York, but no other space character can be added before of after the name.
• To facilitate reading, the various views of Ancestris (in particular the editors) can display spaces after the commas. These spaces are not saved in the Gedcom file.

Place formatting

All places of the same genealogy must be described according to the same jurisdictions and in the same order.

This is the place format of the Gedcom file.

This format is indicated inside the Gedcom file, for all places in the genealogy, in the header of the Gedcom file.

These are the following lines of the header (HEAD) of the Gedcom file that will indicate this correspondence

1 PLAC
2 FORM neighborhood, postal code, city, county, state, region, country

This format is optional in the header but in terms of consistency and data quality we strongly recommend using it.

For a genealogy covering several countries, you therefore need a generic format that is sufficiently extensive to allow the places of all the countries considered to be referenced under the same format.

Changing place formatting

The Modification of place criteria window allows to add or remove a type of jurisdiction in the format of the location, and also to modify the order of the different types of jurisdictions, for all locations and all the entities of the genealogy file. This window is accessible from the File / Properties menu.

Changing the format of places is also possible from the Gedcom editor: right-click on a PLAC line, then Contextual menu, then Change place format menu iem.

To enter a location, you must rank the different jurisdictions in ascending order of importance, separating each level with a comma.

If a jurisdiction is not entered, the comma must be kept.

Entering a place

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