genealogicalwhere

Genealogicalwhere is a concept in genealogy and digital humanities referring to a structured approach to recording the geographic and temporal context of genealogical records. It combines location data with time data to anchor events such as births, marriages, deaths, and residences in a spatiotemporal frame.

In practice, genealogicalwhere can be implemented as metadata fields that store a place, historical jurisdiction, coordinates, and a date or date range; it supports geocoding and mapping, enabling researchers to visualize family movements and filter searches by region and period.

The term emerged in discussions about integrating GIS tools with family history databases, and is used by researchers to differentiate between places with the same name or multiple historical jurisdictions.

Benefits and limitations: It improves search precision and migration analysis; but it faces difficulties from place-name changes, boundary shifts, ambiguous records, and inconsistent dating; differences in historical vs modern geography require careful interpretation.

Related topics include geographic information systems in genealogy, place-name disambiguation, and genealogical metadata.