ATTENTION Curators, please assist

Have I missed the update to distinguish between adopted, biological and foster children??? I haven't worked on any of my profiles that have an adopted child, so don't know if I missed seeing this update or if it is still a work in progress. If this is a new feature, please send out a message to all of us about it.

Thanks Mike Stangel and all of your fellow programers for all of your hard work that contributes to making Geni the best computer genealogy system!!!!!!! I do sometimes wish we could format a little with bold, italics, & maybe underline capabilities in our messages. Sometimes plain typing just isn't quite enough!

Patricia Ann Scoggin

http://www.geni.com/discussions/145776?msg=1011191

Eldon, Thanks for the site info. After my message I went to one of the 2 great aunts who I knew were adopted and then to the relationship page and found the new options for the parents. I worked thru the process to get people where they should be... I'm sure I went the long way and definately made more work for myself than if I had known about the site you mention above... However, I think I got everything "fixed" and now show adoptive parent and biological parents for both ladies. Now that I have done that I will read thru how I SHOULD have done it. HaHa!!!

I have a few other family members who will need to be worked on.

My only problem with those 2 profiles is in another area--Place of Burial--It only shows the cemetery but not the rest of the city/state for the cemetery. I haven't checked to see if this is on other profiles or for just these two. I have even left their profiles going to others and then back or even leaving geni completely and it still only showed the cemetery name but nothing else in spite of showing both when I went into the edit profile section... Here is one of the profiles that has the problem: Sena Nelson (Nielsen; Anderson) Maybe someone could check to see if it is just me or if there is a problem. I added her cemetery info as I was working on her profile... I also wasn't sure how to address her "maiden" name so put both the biological; adoptive in parentheses (haven't read the directions all the way thru to see if this is addressed or not.)

I am soooooo happy to have this new tool available as it will definitly make keeping the real relationships straight. Thanks to all and for all of the work that has gone into making this available!!!

Patricia Ann Scoggin, the cemetery issue is caused by another change Geni made in entering the data (see my discussion comment from yesterday). My advice is:
1) erase all fields in the place of burial
2) type in the city, state and let Geni populate the fields
3) expand the location details (edit location fields)
4) place your cursor on the first letter in the Place Name field
5) type the cemetery name (the current contents of the Place Name will shift to the right as you type). End your typing with a comma to separate the cemetery from the already typed city.

Jim Wile & Mike Stangel There seems to be a system wide problem as only the cemeteries show with no addresses. The info is in the Edit Profile sections, but doesn't show up on the profile info that shows on the front of the profile!!!!!!!!!!! If it were just one or two profiles that had this problem it would be an "easy" but time consuming fix as Jim suggests above. However it seems that this is showing up for ALL of my family profiles!!!! Sooooo, I hope the programmers will look into this problem and see what they can do to fix it.

Thanks in advance for addressing this issue.

Mike Stangel
I just went to my home page and noticed the my place of birth is only showing the hospital and not the city/state & the same for my sister!!! Is this a part of the above problem???

Mike Stangel
Death info also looks to be missing City/state info also!!!

Jim Wile and Mike Stangel So what you are saying is we have to enter locations twice and unless Geni corrects this, every profile already entered will have to be edited so it will show up correctly.. Whatever happened to "if it isn't broke, don't fix it". Also "new and improved" usually isn't.

Eldon Lester Clark, my experimentation leads me to this conclusion for place of burial. Geni now places the content for fields of city, state,.. in the Place Name field. It used to be empty. If you erase what is in the Place Name field and type a cemetery name, the other fields stay populated but do not print in the profile --- ONLY WHAT IS LOCATED IN THE PLACE NAME FIELD GETS PRINTED in the profile summary. Following my directions that I gave Patricia keeps the information intact.

Jim Wile I am not going to edit my 4944 family profiles. Geni needs to fix this and the sooner the better!

I agree. I also repeat my suggestion that changes that affect the input/output of data, should be announced in the notification section; ie., add another category for notifications besides emails, discussions, ...

Patricia Ann Scoggin, Jim Wile and Eldon Lester Clark you'll see the other information if you hover over the place name, however I agree this is not intuitive. I'll add a little icon next to the place name that you can hover or click for the rest of the info. (This will also solve the touch screen problem where there is no hover)

Mike Stangel

It is still a pain to "hover". I liked it the way it was!!! If I've typed the info I would really like to see the info to be sure that it is right & if someone else has entered the info I would appreciate being able to see it at a glance w/o having to hover! I copy that info to my computer's family tree program notes so I can see if there are any changes since I was last working on that person's profile, as I tend to bounce around in my tree.

Why did you all delete that info from the part that shows all of the vital statistics??? (Name/dates/places/family). It doesn't make sense to show only the name of a hospital or a cemetery without a city/state included. Those new to the Geni system are going to think there is a problem when they have typed in the info & it doesn't show on the main pg after saving & closing.

I agree with Jim about the notifications that go out to all when there are changes... another category would help. If someone hadn't mentioned about the adoption addition here in this discussion, I wouldn't have known about it. Maybe "What's new & Different" or just title it "Geni News". I check the discussions I follow but am not always aware of other discussion that I could be interested in following.

Or maybe in the weekly Family update list the titles only of new discussions that have been started that week. Start or end with a section entitled: "New Discussions started this week".

Or if there are too many to do that way, send out a separate message that lists all new discussions started that wk with just the titles...

At least we would be aware of options to ck out. (Maybe I just don't know where to look to ck on new discussions.) If I am in Geni, I go to the Research heading at the top then click on Discussions and go from there. I didn't find out about that until some time late last year.

Sorry, Mike to complain so much. :-(

I do thank the Geni team that worked on the Adoption/Biological/Foster family member issue. :-)

Chalk up another person not happy about the location/place name changes.

I've always manually filled in the location details. If I had more specific information than the city name, that would go into the place name field. For example, for my birth location I have listed the Hospital name in Place Name. Another example, on death certificates if it lists the address in which the person died, I would list the address in the place name field.

Perhaps that was the wrong use of the place name field? If I'm not supposed to use it that way, can someone tell me where I should be putting that information?

Hi everyone,

Please do NOT delete the data from your locations, this isn't really a matter of what data is in which fields, but rather how we're displaying it.

We've released a change to show an icon (looks like a location pin) and clickable / hoverable box for the address details. I hope that addresses the obvious confusion I caused by putting a hover over something that doesn't look like you can interact with it.

It may help to explain what initiated these changes to begin with. Previously, if Google returned city / county / state (region) / country data (as mapped from the fields locality / administrative_area_level_1 / administrative_area_level_2 / country) we would leave the "place name" blank (unless it got data from Google's "establishment" field). This was a problem for some users because certain locations like "Caribbean" seemed to geolocate but when you saved them, the address data was blank. We fixed that in two ways, first the Google field "colloquial_area" now also maps to Place Name, and second if Google returns no data from establishment or colloquial_area then we're now populating the Place Name field with Google's "formatted_address" field (which is what you see when you select the auto-complete row). This also fixes problems where the user might specify a location like "Taj Majal" and it would seem to geolocate perfectly, but after you save the data you get the structured fields (Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India) but the words Taj Majal are lost. I have the same issue with my birth location, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

We could simply display it all in the profile, but often Google's formatted address is the same information as the structure fields, for example if we strung them all together you get locations like "Pike County, OH, USA, Pike County, Ohio, United States". If they were all wholly duplicate we wouldn't take the formatted address into the place name field, however refer back to the Taj Majal problem.

Thanks for you patience and once you've had a chance to see the new clickable location pin, let me know your thoughts.

Mike Stangel The issue is that we want to see the whole thing without hovering or clicking an icon. Like Jonathan, I always filled in all the fields and when completed, any errors were obvious. Why cant you just go back to the way it was?

Pat Scoggins said it. When I input data, I want to see it in profile view.

Mike Stangel,

There seems to be a number of problems with adding profiles to a project (at least for non paying users).
When I know the profile (the url) I want to add I cannot specify the correct profile (only the first and lastname). But when I put in those (copied from the profile so I'm sure the names are spelled exactly as in the profile) the search will often return no results (profile is public).
Another problem is when the search returns multiple profiles. In that case there is no information provided to choose the correct profile.

One example (no profiles found): Jan Brakenhoff
I want to add it to this project: http://www.geni.com/projects/Nederlandse-Zouaven/people/25252
(I'm trying to do it with Actions / Add profiles from the project and putting in Jan Brakenhoff and clicking search)

The Dutch Curator Private User can add it for me, but it seems to be a bug.

Job, I'll look into this (I just recently made a similar fix in another place) however as a workaround you can copy the ID of the profile out of your web browser's address / URL bar and search for that. For example, Jan Brakenhoff's ID is 6000000009305588783 and you should be able to search for it when adding profiles to the project.

You can, of course, also do it from the profile with "Add to Project" on the Actions menu.

Eldon Lester Clark and Erica Howton the issue we're struggling with is that we're faced with three alternatives to what we have now:

1. Ignore Google's "formatted address" (as we used to do) and you will no longer get cemetery names, hospital names, Air Force bases, Taj Majals, etc when you save the address. Erica this is what you're asking for when you asked me in another thread to revert the code.

2. Save and display both the formatted address as well as the individual location fields, in which case you will get locations like "Pike County, OH, USA, Pike County, Ohio, United States"

3. Write some rather complicated (and error-prone) code to remove duplicate city/state/country information from the formatted address. This is made especially difficult because Google returns the country as either "US" or "United States" for the country field, and then puts "USA" (not an exact match to either) in the formatted address field. There are no doubt many other such cases like that, that we don't yet know about.

4th option: revert the deployment, work through the problem being addressed, perhaps from a different angle.

Re: 1.

I've always entered "place" names such as cemeteries or hospitals with no difficulty; sometimes they are available through geo locate, sometimes not. Are you sure they don't save? For example, I'll enter city, county, state, country, and then the cemetery as a copy & paste.

Is the code assuming we are always using geo locate? We don't - doesn't apply to much of historical places ...

No, it's not that it assumes you're using geolocation; it's that the previous interface gave you no indication that you needed to copy and paste from the autocomplete line into the place name line. For just about everyone but those of you who did it, they would lose the cemetary / hospital name and often not even realize it.

I don't want to go into the weekend with people losing sleep over this, so I'm going to set back a few things and we'll revisit this next week. Until I get a chance to clean up some data you may see duplicates on the profile page.

Mike Stangel Erica Howton good thinking.. I have a question before you shut the office down for the weekend.. I have a family that was born right on the border of ri and ma i can't remember the name but in the 1750's what would modern day provdience ri be? I think that rehoboth ma is too close to tell durring that time frame erica jogged my memory when she said use the geo locate..

Mike,

Thanks for work-arounds. Searching for the number does not work for me, but adding the project from the profile does work.

Well this was a fun little diversion. Thanks again for your patience and your enthusiastic feedback. :-) I've released some formatting changes that should get us through the weekend, displaying all address fields and trying to remove duplicate data from the place name while still preserving the good stuff. Let me know how it looks and we'll revisit next week.

Private I'm afraid I'm not the guy to answer your question -- I don't know the first thing about colonial Rhode Island! Erica or another curator may have some insight.

I figured that wasn't your expertise area i just brought it up to showcase the problems in the field about highlighting locations and such...

I was holding off on that profile because i wasn't sure if i entered it that it would come out messed up per say..

Mike,

Thanks to your work-around I noticed that for some profiles I cannot just add them to the project, but have to send an invitation to the manager to add the profile to the project. Should it be possible to send such an invitation from the project page?