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 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.

Privacy that fails closed. Every public page applies a living-person cutoff (default 100 years, configurable) inside the query itself, so listings, counts, the surname index and household views can never disagree about who is shown. Records linked to a living person, undated unlinked records and anything inside the window are never displayed.

Free and Pro

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

• A searchable occurrence index, filterable by name, 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 every person a record names — parents, spouses, witnesses
• An auto-generated surname index with spelling grouping
• Living-person suppression on all public output, optional map embeds, an optional contact form
• Full export — CSV per record type and a documented archive/handover ZIP

Pro adds 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 carried in your archive.

No usage caps in any edition: no limit on occurrences, households or records. Every edition manages one place study per WordPress site. Pro is licensed per site, annually or for life.

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 does 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. The optional public contact form emails enquiries to the study contact address you set, and nowhere else. If you configure a map embed, your visitors’ browsers load that map from the provider you chose; no map is loaded until you set one. Optional AI import assistance (Pro), 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.

The plugin bundles the Freemius SDK for licensing and updates. Its opt-in screen is optional; skip it and the plugin stays fully functional and transmits nothing.