Place Name Corrections

Place Name Corrections

Quick Entry

I received an email with an interesting question. It dealt with the automatic entry of place names. Suppose you enter a place name and spell it incorrectly, then you go back and correct the spelling. If the corrected spelling falls after the incorrect spelling alphabetically, the Quick Entry feature of Ancestral Quest will present the incorrect spelling as a suggested name. How do we get rid of the incorrect name so that this doesn’t keep happening? Begin by editing an individual.

Here I have created Aabadtown, and saved the record. I really wanted Aagoodtown, so I will go back and correct the spelling.

Now I have corrected the spelling, and saved the record. Next I want to use Aagoodtown for the place of Burial.

I type the letter A, and Ancestral Quest suggests the incorrectly spelled name, because it falls alphabetically before the correctly spelled name.

Now, how do we fix that?

I click Edit on the Menu Bar and select Replace Names/Dates/Places… from the drop down menu.

On the Replace Names/Dates/Places screen select FULL PLACE NAMES, and the rest of the screen will look like this. The Find What: drop down window is where you will  look for the incorrectly spelled version of the town name. Th Replace With: drop down window is where you look for the correctly spelled name. The check box at the bottom is where you remove the incorrectly spelled name from the list of all names. The check will keep it from being suggested by Ancestral Quest when you type the A.

In the Find What: window, type the letter A, then open the drop down portion by clicking on the down arrow. Click on the incorrectly spelled name.

In the Replace With: window, type the letter A, then open the drop down portion (which will go up) by clicking on the down arrow. Click on the correctly spelled name.

The screen will look like the one above. Click on the Replace button.

The Confirm Replace screen appears showing the first record containing the incorrectly spelled name. To replace this instance of the name, click on Yes. To replace all instances of the name, click Yes to All. When all instances of the incorrect name have been replaced, it will be removed from the list. When you are through correcting incorrect names, click the Done button.

Edit the same individual to verify that the name has been corrected.
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