I upgraded the genealogy software and found that the new data model for places makes much sense -- instead of having a single city, county, state, country entry, the city is "enclosed" by the county is enclosed by the state is enclosed by the country. While this explodes one entry into four, in many cases there are many entries in the same region. Now i have an excuse to document the counties and states very well (particularly when it comes to counties that have undergone many boundary changes in the time that the families have lived there). I tried to not be too obsessively detailed in my documentation, but for the Carolinas and Georgia - where family have lived since the colonial era - i've been delighted in now having a way of documenting the change in "enclosure" from England, to Great Britain, to the United States. I'm not exactly sure the best way to indicate changes from say the Province of Carolina to the Provinces of North and South Carolina or West Florida to Louisiana. And then i found West Florida was claimed by Spain until 1820, although Louisiana (which includes the same area) was a state in 1812. How to show that? At the parish level i could show the overlapping enclosure by West Florida and Territory of Orleans and Louisiana.
Very engaged by those details yesterday afternoon.
This is also posted at http://elainegrey.dreamwidth.org/567475.html .
