Places in a GEDCOM are just text. Every program stores whatever was typed. Over years, and across imports from other people's files and other websites, the same town gets typed every way there is:

Boston, MA
Boston, Mass.
Boston, Massachusetts
Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA
Boston, Suffolk, MA

To a naive program, that is five places.

What GED-VIEW does about it

GED-VIEW's built-in geocoder knows a place under every name it has had, in every language and script, historical names included (Königsberg for what is now Kaliningrad, Danzig for Gdańsk, Beč or Wien for Vienna), plus former countries and provinces such as Yugoslavia or Prussia. So most of these spellings resolve to the same location and land on the same pin on the map, and the pin lists each spelling with its count. This runs entirely in the browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

The spellings themselves stay distinct. Each different string in the file is its own entry in the Places list, because each is a different piece of text in your data. GED-VIEW points the variants out instead of silently merging them: the Issues page flags place names that look like the same place spelled differently, places recorded under different parent places, and places it could not locate at all.

It is not perfect. A common village name with nothing to tell it from its namesakes, a spelling the data does not have, or a place that exists only in your file (a farm, a house) ends up unlocated or pinned to a broader area. Geocoding by the borders a place had at the date of the event is planned.

Finding what it could not resolve

The Places list shows every distinct place string with a count. Search for a town and see how many entries come back. The Issues page reports likely variants and lists places that could not be located.

Fixing them

The fix happens in the program that owns the tree. Every desktop program has a place list with a merge or rename function. RootsMagic has a Place List with a merge button. Family Tree Maker has a Places workspace where one place can be resolved to another. Gramps has a place editor with hierarchy. Legacy has a Master Place List with a Combine option. Ancestry and MyHeritage suggest a standard place when a fact is edited.

Whatever convention you use, keep it consistent within your own file. If you record historical names, or a particular structure, that is fine; the important thing is that the same place is spelled the same way each time it appears.

Then re-export and check the Places page again.

Next

Open Places, search for the town your most common surname comes from, and count the entries.