Pete's Log: Vesta Shared Places for Webtrees

Entry #2377, (Genealogy)
(posted when I was 45 years old.)

For the most part I'm quite happy using webtrees for genealogy. Most of its quirks are not of its own doing, but a result of the choice to use the GEDCOM format as its underlying data store.

One such quirk that has bugged me more than it should is the static nature of place hierarchies. My dad was born in Overpelt in the Belgian province of Limburg. In 2019, Overpelt and nearby Neerpelt were merged into a single municipality called Pelt. The Belgian province of Limburg is a successor to a larger province of Limburg that was split in two in 1839, with the other half going to the Netherlands. Prior to 1830, Belgium did not exist as a country and the whole provice of Limburg was part of the Netherlands. The province of Limburg itself was only formed after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Previously Overpelt had been part of the County of Loon, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire and was later occupied by revolutionary France.

Since I have the family tree in Overpelt going back to the 1590s, I'd love anyone associated with Overpelt to show the place hierarchy for the time they were alive. But if I enter their location as "Overpelt, Loon, Holy Roman Empire" then it is considered a different location from "Overpelt, Limburg, Flanders, Belgium." Which I also don't want.

Today I discovered the Vesta Shared Places module for webtrees. This turns places into objects that can hold more facts and data about the place. And those facts can be date-based.

This means the counties and provinces and countries to which Overpelt has belonged over the years can now all be modeled in one place. And when looking at an individual or event, the name and hierarchy of the place are displayed as they were at the time of the event.

I'm excited about this discovery. It does have the drawback that it diverges from the GEDCOM standard, but it's a well-documented divergence and apparently supported by multiple genealogy programs. So I think I can live with it. I think the only time I would be impacted is if I ever exported a GEDCOM file to share with someone else, and my understanding is they would just lose the custom place data if they imported it into a program that doesn't understand it. The raw places would still be there.

And even though I don't know of anyone in the family who lived in Brookfield before we moved here in 2017, I made sure to have the Brookfield name only apply to the place starting in 1905. Prior to that it was Grossdale.