[APG Public List] [APG Members] place names

[Everett B Ireland]

John:
I might suggest that Dr Melinda Kashuba has written an excellent book on 
this subject: "Walking with your ancestors: a genealogists guide to 
using maps and geography,"  Cincinatti, OH: Family Tree Books, 2005.
The US Dept of Interior Geographic Names Information System GNIS website 
at geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/ is extremely useful and I use it 
often to locate cemeteries and towns. It provides names as well as 
coordinates.
Everett Ireland

Stephen Danko wrote:

> John,
>  
> I agree with the points you make.  Someone else wrote to me off list 
> with the same concerns.  I haven't thought this problem completely 
> through.  For now, as a general rule, I plan to use coordinates to one 
> decimal place to specify a town or village.  If I have an exact 
> address (or location of a tombstone), I'll use four or five decimal 
> places.  Even these plans have their faults.  In any case, if I write 
> a narrative that includes coordinates, I will take your advice 
> and explain my intent.  Perhaps something as simple as "Coordinates 
> expressed to one decimal place denote a general area.  Coordinates 
> expressed to four decimal places denote an exact location" might be 
> sufficient.
>  
> By the way, where the heck is our esteemed colleague Randy Seaver?  
> His background and expertise is just what is needed for this discussion!
>  
> Stephen J. Danko
> http://www.stephendanko.com/
>  
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: John <john at jytangledweb.org>
> To: apgpubliclist at apgen.org
> Sent: Tue, October 26, 2010 9:42:50 PM
> Subject: Re: [APG Public List] [APG Members] place names
>
> Stephen,
>
> What you say has truth in it, but in practice one might not
> make the leap that the number of significant figures presented
> means that the uncertainty is in the next decimal place.
> In scientific publications one always attempts a computation
> of RMSD (root mean square deviation) and write it with a +/-
> to prevent confusion. Like 37.79507 +/-0.00005


-- 
Everett B. Ireland, CG
CG, Certified Genealogist, is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists used under 
license by board certificants after periodic evaluation.


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