Formatting Locations

Jennie Goodwin wrote:
>First question.  Most people use the standard location
>structure, I assume:  city, county, state, country.
>
>Wht do you suggest for places, like hospitals,
>churches, cemeteries?  Before the city or after the
>country?

A common question, asked often, answered in *many* different ways.

For myself, I've decided on putting the special place in parentheses 
after 
the City, which is pretty much the same as using a hyphen. Examples 
this 
would be:

   McMinnville (Evergreen Memorial Park), Yamhill County, Oregon, 
United States
   Portland (St. Vincents Hospital), Multnomah County, Oregon, United 
States

My reasoning for using Locations with Special Places in parentheses 
after 
the City:

1. I don't use events for locations. In a database sense, repeatedly 
storing something that gets repeated many times over (an event) is bad. 
For 
example, if you use events to specify cemeteries and want to add some 
information about a particular cemetery, where are you going to put 
that 
information? You need to add it to the event for each person who uses 
that 
cemetery.

2. I don't use the solution that separates a Special Place with a comma 
because the vast majority of my Locations do not have a Special Place 
with 
them; that would require me to include an extra comma in the majority 
of cases.

3. I don't use the solution that places the special place after the 
Country 
because the special place is almost certainly most closely related to 
the 
City and not the County, State, or Country.

4. I use parentheses because they provide both an opening and closing 
symbol around the Special Place where the hyphen only provides an 
opening 
symbol. I believe others may make the opposite choice because the 
hyphen is 
less intrusive.

Dennis Nichols