One location - multiple names!

Question

This location in Monson, Massachusetts was known at various times under different names, for different populations, including

• State Almshouse at Monson
• Monson Sanitarium
• State Primary School
• Massachusetts State Hospital for Epileptics
• Monson State Hospital

How would you make a category for this place? Would you choose the most recent name and make a note of all the others, or make a category for each name, depending on when the individual was a resident there? Would love to hear opinions - I'm stumped!

Answer 1

I would use the most recent name as you suggested. Many locations in Massachusets have had name changes over the years.

Answer 2

E Childs, I thought about this for a very long time. We have a place here that has had three names. Manteno Mental Health, Illinois Veterans Home at Manteno, and then Diversatech in that order. It is still known as Diversatech. But when people refer to it, unless they are new to the area, it is always referred to as Mental Health. It seems like the original name stuck.

Sames goes for other buildings in our area. The buildings that were here 200 years ago, all are known by the original name.

The reason for my introduction is to give you my opinion.

If I were to bundle all of the names above into one category, I would use the original name.

Answer 3

Personally, for anywhere that has had multiple different names over time, I would not prioritise the current name over any other. My reasoning is that I would like to think that WikiTree will still be around in some form in 100 years time, at which point that will probably no longer be the "current" name but just the name it happened to have in 2019. If it is just to have one name then there would be more logic in giving it the first name it was ever known by, as that will always be its first ever name.

Answer 4

This reveals a problem I've been seeing in our category structure.  All other place and personal names are to b what they were called by themselves at that time.  And yet when trying to find a cemetery that has multiple names (and in multiple jurisdictions as time goes by) there is only one name.  If you don't know the current name when looking at a 18th c death record, you are up a creek without a paddle.

There should be a way to have all the names and re-direct to one category.  But it would take programming.

Comments

Wikipedia has a capability for redirecting a category, so that someone who lands on (say) Monson State Sanitarium can be advised to go to the Monson State Hospital category instead.

Until such a capability is instituted here, users will be confused by the category structure, and (as the category system grows) the Categorization project will be increasingly burdened with naming issues. The category dropdown lists have been a big help with this situation, but they are only a partial solution.

---

We have the ability to do category redirects, but this would present other issues. For example, we cannot currently prohibit the attachment of a profile to the category containing a redirect. So if profiles should go in the Monson State Hospital category, we cannot stop someone from adding Monson State Sanitarium to a profile.

In regards to Wikipedia, I wish this would stop being used as a comparison tool. We cannot always do the same thing since WikiTree is a highly customized system on an older version of Mediwaiki. Wikipedia also uses subdomains for languages, Lua programming in templates, as well as a host of other possibilities that are simply not feasible here at WikiTree.