UPDATING PLACES USING

FAMILY INSIGHT AND NEW FAMILYSEARCH

©Copyright 2010 by Donald R. Snow

This page last updated 2010-01-21.
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION TO CLASS
CORRECTING AND UPDATING PLACE NAMES IN YOUR PAF DATABASE
  1. RUN PAF PAL ON YOUR PAF DATABASE
    • PAF Pal is a helpful PAF utility program to do several things, including expanding and contracting U.S. state names, and adding and removing USA after them
    • PAF Pal is now free for everyone; you have to register, but the license is free as of Dec 2009 -- available from http://www.ohanasoftware.com
    • Run PAF Pal on your PAF database to expand all the U.S. state abbreviations and to add USA on the end of them
    • Check that all U.S. places have the state name spelled out and "USA" (without the quotes) at the end -- You may have to use PAF's Place Sorted List to check this and correct any problems.

  2. RUN PAF'S GLOBAL-SEARCH-AND-REPLACE TO CHANGE "USA" TO "UNITED STATES"
    • New FamilySearch wants "United States" instead of "USA" or "United States of America" (no quotes)
    • Global Search and Replace is under the Tools Menu
    • Make a backup of your database before running Global Search and Replace and be very careful, since it may change more than you want; but you can run it a second time to get things the way you want.
    • Run Global Search and Replace to change all occurences in Locations of ", USA" to ", United States" (no quotes) -- the reason for including the ", space" is so that it doesn't change places like Azusa to AzUnited States.

  3. STANDARDIZED PLACE LIST
    • New FamilySearch has set up a Standardized Place List they are all entered uniformly
    • Can check a location's correct name by typing it into Standard Finder on http://labs.familysearch.org -- it will list the possibilities for you
    • Full Standardized Place List doesn't seem to be posted anywhere

  4. RUN FAMILY INSIGHT ON YOUR DATABASE TO CHECK AND CORRECT THE LOCATIONS
    • Family Insight (used to be called PAF Insight) is a commercial program ($25), but free in FHC's -- available from http://www.ohanasoftware.com
    • Family Insight shows all places from your database in a list and allows you to edit all occurences of a place at the same time -- very helpful 
    • Below is a paragraph from my notes on FAMILY INSIGHT from -- http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-familyinsight.html
    • EDIT PLACES OPTION IN FAMILY INSIGHT
      • Edit Places feature of Family Insight makes cleaning up your PAF database much easier
      • Family Insight shows list of all the places used in your PAF database with the number of times each occurs, e.g. a 7 in the right column indicates that place is used 7 times in your database
      • List is sorted alphabetically from largest to smallest jurisdiction, i.e. by country, then state or county, then by city or parish -- this sorting is not obvious since they are left-justified and the countries and states don't line up under each other
      • Clicking on a place, if connected to the Internet and logged onto New FamilySearch, goes to nFS and tries to find that place and shows the correct spelling, county, etc. -- very helpful to get your places correct
      • Can edit all records in your PAF database that use that location by just double clicking on it and editing it -- that corrects it in every record where it occurs throughout the entire database
      • Can also drag and drop misspelled locations onto correct ones to change all the misspelled ones -- the total number of times that location is used then increases according to how many records were changed
      • Highlighting any location shows the individuals that use that location in the upper-right panel and clicking on a name in that panel shows that person's record in the lower-right panel -- you can edit that person's record there, but editing there doesn't change the place in other occurrences
      • This place editing option is extremely helpful to get places uniform in your database and gets them the way New FamilySearch wants them
ASSIGNMENT
  1. Run PAF Pal on your PAF database and expand all U.S. state names and add USA.
  2. Run PAF's Global Search and Replace option and replace USA with United States.
  3. Use Family Insight and New FamilySearch and check the locations you have in your PAF database and soccurrencesg corrections.
Return to Don's Class Listings page or to the home page of  Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group . occurrences