When importing a Gedcom file, I ran into odd results, some addresses were imported as intended, but some not. The data for all is present in the Gedcom file.
Looking at the Gedcom file itself, I notice that when there is a 2 PLAC tag, GRAMPS ignores all other address elements except the 2 PLAC info. If there is no 2 PLAC tag, all fields of the address are imported.
With the example below, left column imports only ‘House’ and the right column all the parts of the address.
Not working
Works
2 PLAC House
2 ADDR
2 ADDR
3 ADR1 Address line 1
3 ADR1 Address line 1
3 ADR2 Address line 2
3 ADR2 Address line 2
3 ADR3 Address line 3
3 ADR3 Address line 3
3 CITY Somecity
3 CITY Somecity
3 STAE Some county
3 STAE Some county
3 POST 12345
3 POST 12345
3 CTRY Somewhere
3 CTRY Somewhere
Is this a bug, or just because of the fuzzy Gedcom standard? Can it be helped?
It is, indeed. GEDCOM allows both PLAC and ADDR as separate structures, where one can be used for a hierarchy, and the other is meant to store a postal address as it’s used in the subject’s local culture. And that means that the ADDR data can never be stored in the PLAC structure, because the latter in universal, and has no idea of local culture at all.
If you mean program, it is Geni.com. But regionally, in Sweden/Finland the church had to keep books of all people, and these were done per house, so in genealogy it is customary to use Gedcom:place for the name of the house /farm etc, and then the village, municipality etc. as address.
I filed a bug report now, 0013462: Error with Gedcom import
Well, that may be customary, but it’s not standard, so I doubt that we will support that. Place and address are separate entities, and should always be treated as such.
Not sure I understand, is the use of PLAC and ADDR defined to exclude each other within the Gedcom standard?
Maybe I should have used a better word than customary, this is how information from church books (aka communion books) is to be noted. All inhabitants of a house, their relation (wife, son etc) and the communions taken are noted, very often also birth and death year. Every 5-10 years a new book is opened, and you can follow the family. This is perhaps the primary source of genealogical information 1700 onwards.
OK, I get it, and I understand what you’re saying, but what I mean was if it’s customary for Geni, and it is. What you described is a habit that exists in many countries, and which most of us register a census event.
The problem that you see here, which I can confirm with my own export from Geni, is that these lines are exported as if they belong together, in such a way that the ADDR part gives details for the PLAC. And that is wrong, and not standard. PLAC and ADDR are separate entities, and that is proven by the fact that they both appear at the same level in the GEDCOM file, which is 2 here, because they were both exported as extra information for an event. The details that are listed at level 3 belong to the ADDR, and not to the PLAC, so that part of the Gramps import is right.
What’s wrong is, is that if the PLAC is there, Gramps does not seem to import the ADDR. It should import that, because the ADDR is a legitimate part of GEDCOM, since years, and under normal circumstances it should import that as a contact or mailing address, and not as a hierarchy, because there is no universal way to do that, or to convert a place back to an address. Address formats differ by culture, and can change over time.
In this particular case, one can argue that it would be nice if Gramps can import this as it was meant by Geni, but if we do that, we’re sort of fixing Geni’s bugs.
I did another check, and found that Gramps works well, sort of. It imports the place, which is one line, as it should be in the standard, and it imports the address too. I missed that earlier however, because I did not check the alternative location tab. And that contains the actual address, which starts with the street, for a nearby cemetery which I stored in my tree on Geni.com.
There is an inconistency though, for events that are exported as an ADDR without a preceeding PLAC. For those, Gramps creates a hierarchy that follows the lines from the ADDR.