> Mini User manual for GenTle 0.3.5
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Places management

During your genealogy research, you will want to specify somehow that Josef Novak was born in Cesky Tesin in Czech Republic or that your grandfather died in London. In other words, you need to specify a place related to person or event. To help you with this issue, GenTle enables to manage places.

Places management is shared as well so that you can introduce a place only once and reference it from different places in GenTle. To do this, open Places dialog (from menu or tool-bar). You will see tree view area with predefined node .PLACES. If you want to specify that Josef Novak was born in Cesky Tesin, you will need to reference place Cesky Tesin from Josef Novak's personal record. To do so, you must introduce Cesky Tesin as a place and it must be specified in .PLACES node. This kind of node is called place type node and you can create such a nodes as well. But you cannot reference places introduced in user defined nodes in personal records or events. This places are used only for description of another places. Why this is needed? Because you may need to have an information that Cesky Tesin was part of different countries, kingdoms or regions in the history. In other words you need to express historical evolution of a place in time. So how can you do this?

If you want to have place that you can reference from personal or event records, select .PLACES item in the tree view of Places dialog and press Add button. Place dialog appears and enables you to specify several informations about a place. You can add name of a place, its coordinates, time interval of validity etc. You can specify type of a place as well. By changing place type, you can move a place in tree-view of a Places dialog. Don't try drag and drop to move place in the tree view, this feature is not implemented at this time. Pressing Ok button will close Place dialog and a place will appear in .PLACES node. If you don't want to exhaustively describe historical evolution of a place, you are finished and you can reference this place from person's or event's records. But whenever you change your mind, you can add historical information after you have referenced a place several times and all references will contain actual data. You don't need to care about it and you don't need it to correct it manually. This is common approach that forms GenTle's design -- enter information only once and use it on many places. Change information from anywhere you want and don't care about consistency of data. It will be consistent since GenTle takes care about it for you.

Ok, you have a place Cesky Tesin and you want to add some historical information about this place. Lets have an example: Cesky Tesin was a part of Czech republic (so called first republic) from 1918 till 1938, than was part of Germany from 1939 till 1945, then Czechoslovakia from 1946 till 1994 and than part of Czech republic from 1995 till nowadays (this is not exact situation. It is more complicated with Czech Republic, but just for simplicity). You want to specify that Cesky Tesin was part of Abbey of Tesin from 1512 till 1948, region of Northern Moravia from 1512 till nowadays and state of Ostrava from 1945 till nowadays.

To accomplish this task, you need to create several place types nodes. Select Places root item in Places dialog and press Add button. Place type dialog appears. You can specify a name for place type, e.g. Republic, Abbey, Region or State. Lets create all of them.

Select Republic place type in the tree view and press Add button. Place dialog appears. We know this dialog already so we can specify all republics where Cesky Tesin takes a part during history and we will specify date ranges when was the republic valid. So for the first Czech republic it will be from 1918-10-28 to 1938-03-08. You will create all other republics in the same way, as well as Abbey of Tesin in Abbey node, region of Northern Moravia in Region node and state Ostrava in State node.

Now, select Cesky Tesin from .PLACE node and press Edit button. Place dialog appears with information about Cesky Tesin. SelectPlaces tab on this dialog and you will see table of associated places. To associate a place with Cesky Tesin, press Add button and select a place you want to associate with Cesky Tesin. You can associate any place that you have introduced but not a place for you are specifying association since you will probably not want to specify Cesky Tesin as a part of Cesky Tesin. In this way you can specify Cesky Tesin as a part of several regions with information when it was a part of specified region. Whenever you will change information for any place, even already referenced, you will have correct data for all other places. As already described, GenTle manages data consistency for you so you don't need to take care about it.

In that way, you can create different place types and describe historical evolution of places in time. There is no constraint about number or kinds of place types, since American user will have another needs than Czech user or user in China. You can create even Planet or Galaxy place type if you think your grand grand children can be born on Mars and will continue your genealogy research.

This is also philosophy that influenced GenTle's design. Many users worldwide have different needs and GenTle tries to be as robust and simple as possible. If one user wants to have exhaustive historical information about places introduced, she should have a way how to enter such an information. But there must be a way how to specify place a in ten seconds if user takes no care about its history. I have tried to design GenTle in this way.

	Upcoming Changes
	I have some suggestions from genealogy community about places management so some other information can be added to place description in the future.

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