Placename GEDCOM import error from Gramps

[Peter Flynn]

I am importing a GEDCOM generated by Gramps and it’s throwing up the error:

Performing GEDCOM validation...
Invalid place encodings were detected. These errors should be fixed. 
Cleanup Places  
Example of invalid place from your GEDCOM:
1 OCCU
2 DATE 1909
2 PLAC Royal Navy HMS Tamar shore station

Unfortunately it doesn't say why it's invalid, so I have no way of knowing what needs to be fixed. It is indeed used in an Occupation “event” but all we know if he worked there, not what his job was, so the occupation itself is empty. Is that what phpgedview is complaining about, or is there another reason?

[Gerry Kroll]

Errors reported by the Gedcheck feature in PhpGedView aren't usually fatal. You need to attend to "critical" errors, but the others can be ignored or lived with.

Place names need more information than what you've provided:
What town is closest to the station, what county is that town in, what country?

In this case: Royal Navy HMS Tamar shore station, Victoria City, ,Hong Kong

Notice that the "county" field is empty, since there aren't any counties in Hong Kong.

[Peter Flynn]

Yes, it happily elides or corrects them. It wasn't clear what it needed though...tha ks very much for the pointers; I thought the error was syntactic rather than semantic. Gramps (my front-end) doesn't seem to provide named subfields of an address, though: I'll have to check with them how to enter that data (I think I had a post on that already, and no-one had a satisfactory answer -:)

[Gerry Kroll]

Place names are free-form, with each sub-field separated from its predecessor by a comma.

When I described the sub-field order, l left out "state/province". The last 4 fields are normally:
Place, County, State/Province, Country. Preceding the Place name, you can have other details such as street address.

In my database, I leave out the county and its comma for countries where it's not meaningful or where the county names and boundaries have changed too much (as they have for Canada, for example). For places such as Monaco, you'd just code Monaco, Monaco or simply "Monaco". Ditto for Singapore.

For the UK, I do something like: Ambrosden, Oxfordshire, England, and for the USA: Wellington, Lorain Cty., OH, USA . Some people leave out the "Cty." suffix or make it "Co", and they spell out "OH" as "Ohio". Just be consistent. In my site, I separate the UK into its component countries (England, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man, Channel Islands), and I treat Eire and Northern Ireland as "Ireland". Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London are treated as if they were counties in their own right. That also happens for city states in Germany (Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin)

The number of place name sub-fields you use for each country in your database is entirely up to you, but you should be consistent in how you code these places, otherwise the Place List report in PhpGedView becomes useless.

You can check out how this is supposed to work on my site: https://keldine.ca/phpGedView