Class: U.S. CITIES GALORE
©Copyright 2005 by Donald R. Snow
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. This page was last updated 29 Jun 2005.
WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION TO CLASS
- Welcome
- Instructors are Elder and Sister Donald R. and Diane M. Snow,
217-453-6306 of the Illinois Nauvoo Mission (snowd@math.byu.edu,
dms34@juno.com)
- This class continues our discussion of auxiliary genealogy tools
and will discuss the program U.S. Cities Galore.
- These notes with all the Internet links are online at http://www.familyhistorycenter.org
under Class Descriptions and Notes and at http://www.uvtagg.org under
Class Outlines.
ABOUT U.S. CITIES GALORE
- U.S. Cities Galore is a program that lists cities and counties in
a U.S. state, identifies the county that a city is in, and helps with
cleaning up genealogy databases.
- Commercial program ($29.95 from http://uscitiesgalore.com),
but free for FHC's (contact author at the URL to get codes for a FHC)
- Current version is 2.0.0 (Build 8) -- many changes over version 1.
- Does much clean up automatically when working with a GEDCOM, but
not a PAF file -- corrects place entries, spellings, and spaces for
commas.
- The Family History Department of the LDS Church had a notice
about its availability in their Family History Department Memo, Vol.
23, No. 3, dated August 2002.
- You can run USCG in the
background while running PAF (or any other program) so you can look up
cities, their counties, and spelling.
ACTIONS AVAILABLE
- Set your PREFERENCES by going
to Edit/Preferences or
Ctrl-P for things like:
- State names abbreviated or spelled out
- Add the word County after counties or leave it out
- Select what events (birth, marriage, residence, etc.) you
want checked when starting with a GEDCOM
- Note: Occasionally it is helpful when working on your
database to add the word County when you have only the county name and
not the city, so
you know
it refers to the county. Then, later remove the word County and
let the commas
indicate that the name is for the county, as is usual in genealogy.
- The five tabs across the top of the main screen of U.S.
Cities Galore, with their shortcut keys, are
- To perform any of the actions press the shortcut key or click on
its tab (press F10 or
Ctrl-Tab to
cycle
through each of the tabs).
- Another shortcut key is F1 = Help and the Help screens list
additional shortcut keys.
- Each of the city lookups shows the lattitude and longitude of
that city and you can type this into notes or sources, but it can't be
copied.
- Note: the lattitude and longitude of cities is given in
degrees,
minutes, and seconds and needs to be converted to decimal degrees for
simplicity of entry in many GPS instruments or online maps
- LOOKUP COUNTY (F3)
- Select or type in the state and press Enter and it shows all
cities in that state.
- Select or type in the city and press Enter
and it shows the county that the city is in at present, but not
historically.
- Click Copy County or Copy All to save the county
or the
whole location to the clipboard so you can paste it into your PAF or
other program by right-click/paste or Ctrl-V.
- LOOKUP
LIST OF CITIES WITHIN A COUNTY (F4)
- Select or type in the state and press Enter to get
a list of counties in the state.
- Select or type in the county and
press
Enter to get a list of cities in that county.
- Select or type
in the city and press Enter and you see the whole location in correct
form, spaces and all, in the bottom field.
- Click on Copy City or
Copy All to save the city or
the entire location to the clipboard to paste into PAF or some other
program by right-click/paste or Ctrl-V.
- LOOKUP BY CITY (F5)
- Finds every city in the U.S. with that name and shows county
and state each is in
- Very helpful when you know the city, but not the state
- You can sometimes piece together enough information from
incorrectly spelled places to find the correct place.
- CLEANUP (F6)
- This is the most powerful feature of U.S. Cities Galore, but
requires starting with a GEDCOM, not a PAF file.
- It checks the
entire
GEDCOM, expands postal
abbreviations for the states, checks spelling of cities and counties,
makes the spacing uniform in locations, and even shows you the further
corrections that need your attention. When done you can save the
edited GEDCOM and import it into a new PAF file.
- To have it check a GEDCOM click Open GEDCOM
file
and
tell it where to find the GEDCOM.
- USCG first goes through the GEDCOM and finds all the types of
events (e.g. births, marriages, residence, military, etc.) and asks
which ones you want it to check -- probably wise to have it check all
events, but you could just do the births, for example
- As USCG goes through the GEDCOM the progress bar at the
bottom of the screen indicates the percentage done.
- When finished it shows columns of the Old
Locations (the way they were) and New Locations (the way
it recommends that they be changed) -- the symbols in the left column
indicate its findings for each location -- the legend is in the box on
the line above:
- (Check Mark) = Changes Were Made
- (Green Dot) = Information Was Correct
- (Red Dot) = Information Is Not Complete or Not Correct
- (M) = Multiple Counties for that City name in that state
- Any location out of the U.S. will have a red dot since the
program
only has U.S. information in its comparison database.
- It automatically suggests spelling corrections of cities,
counties, and spelling out
the
state names, and where there is an M you need to determine which county
is the correct one since there is more than one county with a city of
that name in that state.
- You can review all the suggested changes, edit them further,
or
do
more corrections yourself, before saving the edited GEDCOM.
- Clicking in the heading of a column sorts or
reverses the sort alphabetically by that column and is indicated by a
small triangle in
the column heading.
- In the New Locations field you are given several
options of sorting
- "Forward" and "Reverse" refer to the lines themselves, not
the whole column
- Forward alphabetizes by the spelling starting at the
lowest
jurisdiction (the
city)
- Reverse alphabetizes by the spelling starting at the
highest
jurisdiction
(the
state or foreign country)
- Note that the places are lined up exactly over one another
in both the Forward and
Reverse sorts so you can see problems at a glance -- This is a very
helpful feature.
- When a location is highlighted it also shows in the field at
the
bottom
of the screen and remains there
when you go to any of the search options so you can remember what you
are looking for.
- Double-clicking on a
location in the New Locations list
opens the Find and Fix/Lookup County screen with as much information
already filled in as possible. Or you can get to this by
highlighting a place in the New Locations list and clicking on the
incorrect
location. Find the correct city in the list and
click on it so
the entire location shows. Then click Copy and
Paste Into Record for it to automatically replace the incorrect entry
in
the New Locations list. Or click No Change
-
Goto Next to skip that one and go directly to the next location
needing correction with the data filled in on the Lookup County
screen.
- Click on the Cleanup tab to go back to the cleanup screen at
any time.
- The USCG database has no abbreviations so it has Saint George
instead of St.
George and gives
red dots
if you use the abbreviation. It is usually better not to use
abbreviations, but if you decide you want them you can modify the USCG
comparison file (see the Add of Modify Locations Tab below).
- There
is a very handy Global Search
and Replace function in the New Locations column by
going to Edit/Find and Replace
or by
Right-Clicking on a place in the New Locations list.
- The incorrect entry
can be Ctrl-C-Copied/Right-Click-Pasted into the
Find field. Then enter the correction you want and click Replace
All.
You see the scroll bar moving down as it goes through the
entire
database and corrects all that it finds.
- After making corrections save the GEDCOM by
clicking Save
As and give it a
new name, e.g. [name]-2005-06-30a so you don't destroy the earlier
GEDCOM until you are sure you won't need it again.
- This New Location column in U.S. Cities Galore is much more
powerful
than the Places Sorted
Alphabetically list in PAF since you can sort it in various ways here
and edit the locations directly from this list. This editing
feature works whether the places
are in or out of the U.S., so the
program is very helpful for editing world-wide locations in a GEDCOM
- When you have completed editing the GEDCOM, import it into a
new PAF file.
- ADD OR MODIFY LOCATIONS
(F7)
- This allows you to personalize the USCG database by
modifying,
adding, or deleting cities in any county.
- For example, if you
want to have St. George
instead of Saint George, you can edit the Saint to be St. in the USCG
database
- If,
instead of editing Saint George, you enter a new city called St. George
into the USCG file, both will clear so your database won't be uniform.
- You can also add any historical cities that you
want in the USCG comparison file, but you can't add counties nor
states.
COMMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS
- Help Screens:
Clicking
on Help opens your default browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or
Netscape)
and shows the
help information.
- The Help File is quite complete and worth
looking
at. Click on the appropriate line in the Table of
Contents
to jump to that section of the
Help File. Then click the back arrow of your browser to get back
to the Table of
Contents.
- Shortcut Keys: Most functions in USCG have shortcut keys,
e.g. Ctrl+F
or Ctrl+V, and these are all listed in the Help File.
- Reopen a recently worked on
GEDCOM by
File/Reopen -- you see the last four GEDCOM's you worked on listed
in the pick arrow there.
- The USCG comparison city-county-state database contains
about
300,000
entries and you can personalize it by modifying these or adding more.
- This comparison database can be backed up to save any
additions
or changes you
make by File/Backup Database Files and it can then be restored
to another machine by Restore/Database Files.
- USCG is also helpful for editing non-U.S. locations when using
a
GEDCOM due to the
alphabetized location list.
- General comclusion: USCG is a very useful program for
editing, correcting, and
making
your location data uniform, in or out of the U.S..
ASSIGNMENT
- Use U.S. Cities Galore to lookup a county for some city
in your
PAF database.
- Form a GEDCOM of your PAF database and load it into U.S.
Cities
Galore, perhaps at a FHC, and look at the corrections it finds
automatically.
- Sort the data by the New Locations column in Reverse Sort
(alphabetized on largest jurisdictions) and look for problem locations.
- Use the Search and Replace feature in the New Locations column
--
find some corrections needed, correct one, and save the correction to
the clipboard. Then highlight several that need that correction
and replace them all at once.
- Click on Save/Save As and save your GEDCOM with a new name,
e.g.
[name]-2005-06-30a so you don't wipe out the earlier file until you are
sure you have what you want.
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