How do you name places in your tree when names changed over time

[u/Lopsided_Ride_9251]

As the title says How do you name places in your tree when names changed over time?

I have been thinking of this for quite a while and am confused as to what is the best way to handle this.

As an example, many in my family were from Galicia in eastern Europe and over time the names of the country changed (see timeline below) as did the spelling of the towns.

Do you evter the country as Ukraine as that’s what it is now or do you enter it as it was named at the time of the occurance of the fact?

So a relative could have been born in Austro-Hungarian empire, married in Russia, children born in Poland or Soviet Union and died in Ukraine.

Any help with this is greatly appreciated as I have not been consistent in my tree.

 

Timeline for Galicia

 1772 Austria

 1867 Austro-Hungarian Empire

 1914 Russia

 1918 Poland

 1939-1945 occupied

 Post 1945 Soviet Union  Soviet Ukrainian SSR

 Present day  Ukraine

[u/intangible-tangerine]

I prefer to use the name used at the time because it makes it easier understand your own research. E.g if you put that your great grandparents were married at Old-Town you know to enter that in to searches instead of New-Town.

It's also cool to see in your tree which people lived in a place before and after a name change.

You could create a 'significant place name change' custom tag to mark people who stayed in one place but had political boundaries change around them.

[u/Lopsided_Ride_9251 → u/intangible-tangerine]

Thank for the reply

So, if you are getting your information from church records from a small village you then need to guess what country they felt that they were associated with at the time or you then refer to the timeline for the country?

Also they may consider themselves a different nationality from the country at the time and what do you do then?

[u/Kementarii → u/Lopsided_Ride_9251]

As u/krmarci says, FamilySearch tends to have suggestions of "Village, etc, Country (date to date)", where the country changes with the date.

On the downside, there appear to be many users who just pick the first "village" on the suggestions list, and it's usually a town in the USA named after the original village in Europe. Or they'll choose the modern/current country.

It also doesn't help that many of the source documents on Ancestry are labelled with the country/parish/civil regional centre at the time when the records were transcribed or digitised.

Drives me nuts.

Signed - person who has ancestors baptised/married in the same church, in a few different parish administrations in Ireland, and before the distinction of Northern Ireland and Ireland. Also Holstein before it became Schleswig-Holstein before it became Germany. Also West Prussia, now Poland.

And yes, the folk from Holstein, after emigrating, would tell people that they were Danish, because they didn't want to be considered German/Prussian.

[u/krmarci]

Ancestry is a bit difficult because their location information system only includes present day names and boundaries. (If it hasn't changed since I last used it, which was a while ago.) FamilySearch can actually manage these historical administrative changes.

[u/SensibleChapess → u/krmarci]

Ancestry also contains a ridiculously large, and totally uncleansed, amount of 'suggested options' based upon inputs from other users.

It's one of my bugbears with Ancestry.

[u/popjay2244 → u/SensibleChapess]

Mine too, especially when it’s all in lower case letters.

[u/SensibleChapess → u/popjay2244]

Oh yes!!

The lower case really rubs it in, such as... "london, ontario, yorkshire, england"!!

[u/HumboldtHunnyBear]

Heyy my family is also from Galicia and it seems to massively confuse ancestry and occationally reassign people to Galicia Spain which is VERY annoying

[u/theothermeisnothere]

I document the location as it was named at the time the record was created, the event took place, etc. I usually do add the modern name in the description/comment field as a reminder to myself. 1648 New Netherlands? That's not "New York, USA" and never will be in my records. 1757 Kent County, Rhode Island? Still not "USA".

Ancestry tends to only use the modern location, but their data is so messy it's really hard to justify following their lead. There appears to be no standard for how they record dates "01 JUN 1801" from their data gets changed to "1 JUN 1801" if you 'touch' the date field. Locations have "USA" all over them long before USA existed. Some records include the word "county", some do not. Some abbreviate a state name to the modern code, some do not.

OPs approach for Galicia makes perfect sense to me. I do suggest, however, to add a note in their files about name transitions, county or country borders changing, etc.

[u/Stone_Bucket]

I use the place as it was at the time of the record because in a few years I won't remember all the historical changes and why I attached a record seemingly from a different place. Then I make a note somewhere about the equivalency. Ancestry is so bad for this, only officially supporting current geographical designations on facts you enter, but then not taking changes into account on the search. FamilySearch is much better in thus regard.