The places that I am working with change their names over time as parish information gives way to municipal information and then as municipalites get subdivided.
How can I indicate that, for example, Lurøy was part of Rødøy prestegjeld, Nord-Helgeland prosti, Sør-Hålogaland bispedømme, Norway from before 1700 to 1838, and then its own municipality from 1838 to the present?
Should I create two Lurøys, one enclosed in Rødøy prestegjeld etc and one as a municipality? Even though they’re the same place?
Here is an earlier thread discussing using the Enclosed by tab and the Alternative Names to show the names of a place through time. You create a date path through the place’s hierarchy to create the correct name for each date.
There are date ranges for Place names and Enclosing placed in the Place Editor.
It is important to know that if you set 1 date range within a Place definition, then ALL similar attributes (in the “Alternative Names” and “Enclosed By” tab) also need a date definition.
(Notice that in the date range for the modern name, I didn’t simply use “from 1674”. That’s because the “After” is affected by the Limits in Preferences. That defaults to 50yrs for “After”. So “After 1674” interpreted as “between 1674 and 1724”. Instead I use an extravagant future date: “from 1674 to 3000”)
I thought we discussed before that the preference setting do not affect the Place dates, because I have before and after set to 3 which makes no difference to the Places displayed.
When I stop seeing “?” in the Place Title field in various different places of the GUI and those are no longer resolved by that date workaround, I will accept that premise.
And Gramps also has a real problem when the Event date is unknown and there are date ranges defined for attributes of a Place. (Gramps seems to use “0” for evaluating the Place rather than using today() for that evaluation. And none of my place names are defined for the year zero.)
True. I always think of an event with no date as 1 Jan 1. Which is why I almost always include an alternative place name with no date and an enclosed by hierarchy place record with no date as a last catchall for these events.
The question mark only appears when there is no valid option for the name of the place record.
In your New York City example, New York City will display for any event after 1674. Your “from 1674 to 3000” works. If you edit it to “after 1674”, I guarantee that it will also work for an event in 2026 and any other date after 1674.
The problem with your New York City example that any date before 1674 will display as “NYC”. Because the NYC entry has no dates for when that name is true, as the second entry Gramps will check it will be displayed any event date not after 1674. An event in 1641 will never return “New Amsterdam”.
If there is no valid option for the event date in the enclosed by hierarchy, the place name stops at that hierarchy. In my Woodstock example, you will notice that the hierarch date path stops at Connecticut between 4 Jul 1776 and 1 Mar 1781. The United States did not exist until the Articles of Confederation went into effect on 1 Mar 1781.
As you set up each place record with its enclosed by hierarchy and alternative place names, each record within the hierarchy can have their own set of name changes and enclosed by records.
