Smith DNA Project Community Forums

When someone enters in a location, the TNG program uses Google maps to lookup the location and plot it. This works very well 95 percent of the time. Of course, a general location, such as just TN (for Tennessee) will plot in the middle of the state.  Sometimes, especially when there is both a city or county name that is the same, the location can come up wrong. 

So here's what to do. If this is your part of the tree that you have permissions for, go edit the location and add in whatever information will make it more precise. If, for example, you definitely know WHERE in a given state someone was born, died or married, instead of simply having TN, put in XXXX CO, TN (where CO is the county). Let's say that there is a city called Robert in one state and also a county and Google has decided to map to the city when it's really the county. You can edit that location, again, by adding CO after the place name, as in 

Duncanville, Robert CO, TN, USA 

We would like if you, rather than write out COUNTY please put CO with no period after the CO for consistency. Every single place name shows up in the Places feature, so you could potentially have a number of references to the same place depending on how it was put in. We, from time to time, look at the places to merge them into one common location if there are duplicates, and we will be looking for the location that reads like Robert CO, TN, USA. Note that we would also like you to put in the country location as well for future reports that show varied information depending on which country it is. 

If you don't have permissions to edit a given family or person, you can always send a SUGGESTION and we will fix as time permits.