A one-place study is the mirror image of a one-name study. Instead of following a surname across the country, it reconstructs the whole population of a parish, village, street or house through its records — local history done to genealogical standards.

Your data lives in your own WordPress database and can always be exported in full. A study should outlive its author, and it only can if the data is truly yours.

AP One-Place Studies shares its data core with AP Family Trees and AP One-Name Studies — install any combination and they work together on the same database.

Built by AncestorPress – tools for family history, built to last.

Who It Is For

AP One-Place Studies is being built for:

• One-place researchers publishing a parish, village, street or single-house study on their own site
• Local history groups who want their work searchable rather than hand-built page by page
• Family history societies presenting a place study in a structured, public, professional format
• Anyone reconstructing one location who has outgrown a folder of spreadsheets

What Makes It Different

Households, not just names. A place study is not a list of people in a location — it is who lived with whom, in which dwelling, over time. The plugin is built for that shape: a place hierarchy running from the study place down to individual buildings, occupancy over time, and census households treated as units rather than as loose rows.

An as-recorded discipline. The original spelling, date and place string are stored verbatim and never overwritten. Standardised values sit alongside them with precision and confidence indicators, and remain correctable.

It expects you to arrive with data. This discipline lives in spreadsheets and transcriptions, so CSV import with reusable mapping templates is free and first-class — with prebuilt templates for FreeBMD, UK census returns, parish registers and monumental inscriptions, and your own saveable for any source. Every import is a record set you can reverse as a unit.

What will be free, and what Pro will add

The free plugin is intended to be a complete, publishable one-place study — not a trial:

• A searchable occurrence index, filterable by surname, record type, year range and place
• CSV import with saveable mapping templates, every import reversible as a record set
• Place, street and property pages, with occupancy over time
• Household views, and person pages listing linked occurrences chronologically
• An auto-generated surname index with spelling grouping
• Living-person suppression on all public output
• Full export — CSV per record type and a documented archive/handover ZIP

Pro will add the analytical and organisational layer: capability-based study roles with a contributor review queue, the Study Report, archive restore into a fresh site, optional AI import assistance, and the research tools — a cautious suggestion engine with a judgement queue, a link audit, targeted search with standing interests, and the research judgement log exported in your archive.

Pricing has not been set. There will be no usage caps: no limit on occurrences, households or records.

Where it fits

AP One-Place Studies is one of the AncestorPress suite. It shares its data core with AP Family Trees and AP One-Name Studies, so families you reconstruct from a place study can be published through the tree plugin, and a surname study and a place study can sit on the same site without duplicating data.

Privacy and data

This plugin will not collect or transmit any personal data from your site or your visitors to us. All study data is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database. Optional AI import assistance, if you choose to configure an AI provider, sends only the material you deliberately submit for that task, from your site to your own provider account — never your study database.