Locations Master list: Help

Every location that is referenced by an event or fact in the Family Tree is recorded in the Locations Master List. This way all of the information collected about a particular location is in a central location. This, in particular facilitates ensuring that particular locations are always identified in the same way.

You get to the Locations Master List from the Family Tree Top Level Services web page. When you first enter the Locations Master List web page it displays the first 20 locations in the list in alphabetical order. You can scroll through the list by clicking on the forward and backward arrows at the top of the list.

You may use the "Pattern" field to search for locations based upon their textual representation. Enter the pattern in the Pattern field and press Enter or click on the Search button. Technically the value you enter in this field is a POSIX Basic Regular Expression (BRE) pattern. The following are just some of the ways you can use this pattern.

• Ordinary text, particularly text containing only letters, digits, and spaces, matches anywhere in the location. For example entering "Michigan" will match all locations that contain the text "Michigan". The match ignores the case, so this will also match "michigan" and "MICHIGAN".
• The period '.' matches any single character. You can use this any time you do not know, or care, about what character is present at a particular spot in the location. For example "H.le" will match "Hale" and "Hole".
• The caret '^' (shift-6 on American keyboards), as the first character in a pattern, matches to the beginning of the location. For example to find locations that start with "New" enter "^New", as just entering "New" matches locations that contain the string "new" anywhere in the text. Do not enter "New*" as this will match any location which contains the letters "ne" followed by zero or more "w"s.
• The dollar sign '$' (shift-4 on American keyboards), when it is the last character in the pattern, matches to the end of the location name. For example to find locations that end with "USA" enter "USA$".
• The asterisk '*' (shift-8 on American keyboards) causes the immediately preceding character to match zero or more repetitions. This is most commonly used with the period to skip over any number of characters that do not match. For example the pattern "Mi.*USA" matches any location that has the text "Mi" and later on the text "USA" with any number of arbitrary characters in between. For example it will match locations containing "MI, USA" and "Michigan, USA", "Minnesota, USA", "Bloomington, Illinois, USA", as well as "Mississippi, USA".
• There are many more options which you can experiment with. See regular expressions for details.

The "Name" input field is primarily used to create new location names. Normally a new location name is created automatically the first time an event at the location is added to the family tree. However for administrative purposes it may be desirable to pre-define a location so that it will have the preferred spelling, capitalization, abbreviation, coordinates, boundary, description, and sort order, rather than just accepting what the defaults.

Just type the complete location name into the "Name" field and click on the Create New button. If that name happens to match an existing location name then the existing record is displayed in a new tab or window. Otherwise you are provided with the opportunity to create a new location. The new location is not actually added to the database until you click on the Update Location button. If you change your mind click on the Close button.

Each of the locations displayed on this web page shows:

1. The unique internal numeric key of the location. This numeric key is a link to a web page that displays the details recorded about the location, and if you are authorized to do so, permits you to edit those details.
2. The name of the location as it is displayed in reports. This is frequently a complete postal address.
3. An indicator of whether the description of the location includes its geographic coordinates,
4. An indicator of whether the description of the location includes any textual notes describing the location
5. An indicator of whether the description of the location includes a set of boundary coordinates (for extended areas such as states, counties, or townships).