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Place packs as a foundation to build on

The Place Library has ready-made packs of counties, provinces, dioceses, states and emigration ports. It's easy to see them as a list to import and then forget. But the packs are most useful as a template, a framework your own places hang from.

How to import a pack is described in the manual under Place Library.

Why start with a pack?

When you type places in by hand, you quickly end up with Kopparberg County, Kopparbergs County and Kopparberg county – three places that are really one. The places tree then splits them into three branches, and the statistics count wrong.

A pack gives you the right spelling from the start. When you then create your own places, the country, region, county and parish fields suggest the values that already exist. If you pick the suggestion, the new place ends up on the right branch of the tree.

Choose packs to match your sources

Take the packs for the areas and the period you actually research, not everything at once.

You're researching … Start with
Swedish parish registers Sweden: Counties and Sweden: Counties – historical
Home districts and older literature Sweden: Provinces
Where the archives are Sweden: Dioceses – church archives are arranged by diocese
Finnish roots, Forest Finns Finland: Counties – Swedish era
Norwegian parish registers before 1919 Norway: Amt – historical
Emigrants Sweden: Emigration ports and routes and United States: States

The library shows packs in the language you've chosen in PastPaths. Stick to one language, or you'll end up with both Gävleborgs län and Gävleborg County, for example.

Write it as the source does, not as today's map

If the household examination roll says Kopparberg County, link the event to the historical county, not to today's Dalarna County. The packs of historical counties and amt exist for exactly that. The place then matches the source, and you can see later what it actually said.

Every place in the packs has a description with, for example, the county seat, the lifespan and what the county became. Open the place if you're unsure which division applied in a given year.

Build downwards

The packs contain the big levels. Parishes, villages and farms you add yourself, and that's where the template does the work:

  1. Create the place, for example a farm.
  2. Start typing in the County field and pick the county from the suggestions, so it's spelled as in the pack.
  3. Do the same for Country and Parish.
  4. Save. The farm now sits under the right county and parish in the places tree.

Carry on downwards like that: the parish first, then the villages and farms in it. The more consistently you pick from the suggestions, the cleaner the tree.

The pack's places are ordinary places. You can link events to them just like your own:

  • An emigration to the port it left from, for example Gothenburg in the ports pack.
  • An immigration to the port of arrival.
  • A residence in an American state, when you don't know the town yet.

The place's page then shows everyone who passed through. The ports become a quick way to see who in the family travelled the same route.

Already have places typed in?

Import the pack anyway. A place that exactly matches a place in the pack doesn't become a duplicate – the library only fills in the fields that are empty and never touches what you've written yourself. → Read more

Spelling variants, on the other hand, aren't recognised. If you have, say, your own Stockholm county next to the pack's Stockholm County, merge them and keep the pack's place. All links are moved over. → Read more about merging duplicates

The packs have sources

Every place in a pack has a citation to where its details come from, and the sources become ordinary sources in your database. So you can see where a detail about a county comes from, and use the same source yourself.

Safe to build on

  • Undo doesn't touch what you've built. If you undo an import, only places that are still unused are removed. A place you've linked a person or event to stays.
  • The tag shows the origin. The places get the pack's tag, for example -seed-se-county-en. Click the tag to see everything the pack has touched.
  • Updates add, they don't overwrite. When a pack comes out in a new version, the button says Update. The update brings in places that have been added, but doesn't change places you already have. If a detail has been corrected in the pack, you'll need to enter the correction yourself.

The library needs internet while you import. The rest of the time you work offline as usual.

See also