Places¶

In PastPaths, places aren't just names typed into a text field — they're objects with a life of their own. When you link a person to a place, you can later see "everyone in the family who's lived in Hagfors" or "all events that took place at Mariakyrkan."

Create a place¶

You can create places in two ways:

Directly from the places menu

Go to Places → + Add place.

While editing a person or event

When you fill in, for example, a person's place of birth — start typing the place name. If the place already exists, it will be suggested. If not, you can create it directly without leaving the form.

What can you fill in?¶

A place can have:

Name — e.g. "Härnösand," "Långsjö farm," "Mariakyrkan"
City/town
Parish
County/province
Region — state, province, or Bundesland. Only relevant for some countries (e.g. Belgium, USA, Germany) — leave blank otherwise, e.g. for Sweden.
Country
Place type — city, church, farm, village, etc.
GPS coordinates — for map display
Notes — free text about the place
Photos of the place

Country, county, parish, and city suggest existing values from your own database as you type — so the same place is spelled the same way every time, instead of e.g. "Stockholm County" and "Stockholms län" becoming two different values. You can still type in a brand new value if what you're looking for doesn't exist yet.

Default country

Under Account → Default country, you can set which country is suggested automatically whenever you add a new place. Handy if almost all your places are in the same country — you won't need to type it every time, and you can always change it for individual places.

Link places to persons¶

A person is linked to a place through events — not through a separate "add place" connection. When you enter a person's birthplace or place of death directly in the person form, a connection to that place is created automatically. For every other kind of place connection — residence, occupation, education, marriage, visits — you add an event for the person and specify the place there.

That means a place's page shows everyone who's been connected to it in any way: born there, died there, lived there, married there, or had an occupation there — all gathered under the "Persons" tab.

→ Read more about events

Link places to events¶

When you create an event (marriage, baptism, emigration), you specify where it took place. That place is then linked to the event automatically.

→ Read more about events

Map¶

If you enter coordinates for a place, it will be shown on the map.

Browsing places¶

The places list is built as a hierarchy rather than one long, flat list — handy as soon as you have more than a handful of places to keep track of.

You click your way through the levels in order:

Country — a grid of every country you have places in, and how many places each
Region (only shown when relevant) — for countries with a fourth administrative level, e.g. a US state, a Belgian province, or a German Bundesland. If none of your places in that country have a region filled in — as with Sweden — this step is skipped automatically.
County — the counties within the chosen country (or chosen region, for countries that use the region level)
Parish/city — parishes or cities within the chosen county
Individual places — the usual card or list view, limited to the chosen area

A breadcrumb at the top shows where you are in the hierarchy ("All countries / Sweden / Stockholm County", or for a country with a region level: "All countries / Belgium / Wallonia / Liège"), and you can click back to any earlier level. If you search by name instead, the search bypasses the hierarchy entirely and shows a flat list of results across your whole database, just like before.

Places missing a value at a given level (e.g. no county entered) end up in their own group — "Unknown country," "Unknown region," "Unknown county," or "Unknown parish" — so they're never lost from the list.

Filter by place type

The place-type filter (church, farm, village, etc.) and the country filter in the search bar work together with the hierarchy — choosing a country from the dropdown jumps you into that country exactly as if you'd clicked the card.

Search and filter places¶

In the places list's search box, you can search by name regardless of where you are in the hierarchy — the search bypasses the hierarchy and shows a flat list of results across your whole database. You can also filter by place type and by whether a place is missing coordinates.

List of places — Here you can add a new place, edit or remove an existing one. You can also filter and sort.

Place statistics¶

From the welcome page you'll find a summary of statistics about your places — most common countries, counties, and parishes — with a "More statistics" link to a full statistics page.

The statistics page shows:

Most common countries and counties — number of places per country/county; click a row to jump straight into that part of the hierarchy
Most common place types — distribution across church, farm, village, etc.
Most connected persons and events — which places show up the most in your research
Missing coordinates — how many places aren't mapped yet, with a link to a filtered list
Most common cemeteries
Oldest and most recent recorded event — which places have the oldest and most recently dated event linked to them
Most common emigration/immigration places — especially relevant if your family emigrated

Residents by place¶

On a place's detail page, under the "Persons" tab, you can filter the connected persons by century — handy for, say, seeing who lived on a particular farm specifically during the 1800s, without scrolling through every century at once. The dropdown automatically suggests the most recent century with recorded data for that specific place.

Migration patterns¶

Still on a place's "Persons" tab, a card shows where people came from and where they moved on to, based on each person's chronologically sorted residences. It gives a quick picture of migration patterns for the place — especially useful for tracing emigration waves or common migration routes between towns.

Requires a start date

Migration patterns can only place a residence in the right chronological order if it has a start date. If a connection is missing a date, it won't show up in this card, even though it's still included in the other statistics.

Delete a place¶

If a place is linked to persons or events, you may need to remove those links first — or choose to reassign them to another place when deleting.

Add or edit a place — The form looks the same whether you're creating or editing a place.