FamilySearch Wiki talk:WikiProject County Page Template

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General recommendation: It may be prudent not to simply come up with only one vanilla template for all 50 states. It would be better if a template was created that accounted for each state's differences as consistently as possible. For example, in Ohio, birth and death records were kept solely at the county level until 1908, when the state kept these records centrally, making the county courthouse irrelevant for these types of records from 1908 onward. Cemetery records in Ohio were predominantly kept at a township level in early settlement, as one of the township's functions was to administrate them--however, in states in the Southeast, such as North Carolina, there are no contiguous units of government beyond the county level, whereas in Ohio and many locations in the Northeast and Midwest, counties are ALWAYS broken into townships, some of which in whole or part have become villages or cities. Also, modern records often neglect to record township boundaries, relying mostly on modern ZIP codes, but older records most certainly require attentiveness to townships, including the U.S. Census. Also, in Maryland and Virginia, for example, some parts were divided into hundreds, which are now no longer used, but relevant in locating specific parts of a county. It would be wise to have experienced researchers from each state converse as to differences which would require a statewide divergence for one state, or a group of states, to use a slightly different template that accounts for the state's governmental structure and record keeping structure, making it much easier to know where blanks need to be filled in. It therefore stands to reason that a template for North Carolina might be a bit simpler than one for Ohio or Pennsylvania, albeit not exactly the same, as some sections would not be applicable in other states.

I agree that each state is going to have significant diferences. The idea of a template is to encompass the common elements so that gets done for all fifty places in one shot. All the peculiarities would then be added to the page to make it specific for the state. The great place to have a template with the state peculiarities will be with the county pages in each state. Darris G. Williams 05:14, 13 August 2011 (UTC)