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I suggest that birth place should be just as important as surname in the lists of matches. Two simple suggestions:
1. Every profile should have a list of birth places (for ancestors born more than 100 years ago) based on info in the family tree.
2. Users who do not enter a family tree should anyway be encouraged to enter both a list of family names and a list of birth places (at least countries and counties) of ancestors born more than 100 years ago.
Ok?
The reason is that in for example the Nordic countries, birth place and death place are much more useful in genealogy than family names in identifying lines of heritage. Most Nordic people used patronyms instead of family names until some 100-150 years ago, meaning that people changed surname with every new generation. (Marta Andersdotter was daughter of Anders Ericsson, who was son of Eric Jonsson, etc. But all of them lived in the same village and civil parish, or at least in the same county.)
Any format of the list of birth places would be helpful to start with. Doublecate addresses may be grouped into one item. Later, it might be possible to group the list of birth places by countries and 1st level country administrative sub-division, and maybe also 2nd level. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_...ons_by_country for todays admin subdivision of various countries - but we should stick to the historical division used more than 100 years ago.
We should encourage people to enter geographical info using a certain standard adress format, depending on country, to make it possible to sort the list in alphabetical order or group the lsit.
For example: The traditional address format used in all geneaology software developed in my country is village, parish (county code), country name. For example "Birsta, Skön (Y), Sverige", where Birsta was the village, Skön the civil parish (the second level admin division), "Y" the county code (the first level admin division) and "Sverige" the country name in the native language. Perhaps FTDNA should require country names in English instead ("Sweden") or country codes ("SE"). Many international genaological software force Brittish style or modern style addresses upon us, which causes problems. Cities are not interesting in my country, since all cities historically were parishes, while most parishes were groups of villages on the country side, not belonging to any city but sharing the same church. The civil parishes were the foundation for today's municipalities, replacing but cities and country side civil parishes.
1. Every profile should have a list of birth places (for ancestors born more than 100 years ago) based on info in the family tree.
2. Users who do not enter a family tree should anyway be encouraged to enter both a list of family names and a list of birth places (at least countries and counties) of ancestors born more than 100 years ago.
Ok?
The reason is that in for example the Nordic countries, birth place and death place are much more useful in genealogy than family names in identifying lines of heritage. Most Nordic people used patronyms instead of family names until some 100-150 years ago, meaning that people changed surname with every new generation. (Marta Andersdotter was daughter of Anders Ericsson, who was son of Eric Jonsson, etc. But all of them lived in the same village and civil parish, or at least in the same county.)
Any format of the list of birth places would be helpful to start with. Doublecate addresses may be grouped into one item. Later, it might be possible to group the list of birth places by countries and 1st level country administrative sub-division, and maybe also 2nd level. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_...ons_by_country for todays admin subdivision of various countries - but we should stick to the historical division used more than 100 years ago.
We should encourage people to enter geographical info using a certain standard adress format, depending on country, to make it possible to sort the list in alphabetical order or group the lsit.
For example: The traditional address format used in all geneaology software developed in my country is village, parish (county code), country name. For example "Birsta, Skön (Y), Sverige", where Birsta was the village, Skön the civil parish (the second level admin division), "Y" the county code (the first level admin division) and "Sverige" the country name in the native language. Perhaps FTDNA should require country names in English instead ("Sweden") or country codes ("SE"). Many international genaological software force Brittish style or modern style addresses upon us, which causes problems. Cities are not interesting in my country, since all cities historically were parishes, while most parishes were groups of villages on the country side, not belonging to any city but sharing the same church. The civil parishes were the foundation for today's municipalities, replacing but cities and country side civil parishes.