RM8 Places

On By Marcia Crawford PhilbrickIn RootsMagic8

When entering a place for an event, have you noticed the “pop-up” that prompts you to select a place from the list?

Do you ever get frustrated when there are several similar or the same appear in the list?

This happens when the place list gets ‘corrupted’. For me, that means I either typed in a place and didn’t select it from either the list or the gazateer OR I imported the person/event from some other source. Either way, I have had to periodically go thru my list of places and merge those duplicates. This concept is the same in RM8 as it was in RM7.

However, RootsMagic 8 adds some layers to the process.

  • Address
  • Repositories
  • Places
  • Place Details

Addresses are easily accessible using the left menu heading. Since I only have 3 addresses (email addresses) in RootsMagic, I don’t have any addresses to merge.

However, I do have some repositories that should be merged. To access the list of repositories, I used the COMMAND PALETTE (icon like a paint palette in upper right corner).

In looking over my list of repositories, I found a few that need merged.

  • Ancestry.com (not sure how/why I have two in the list)
  • Ford County Kansas Register of Deeds and Register of Deeds, Ford County Courthouse
  • Office of Vital Statistics, Kansas Department of Health and Environment and Kansas State department of Health and Environment

Clicking on the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the Repositories list, a menu appears.

Since the only option was to ‘Merge All Duplicate Repositories’, I clicked on the ‘PRINT REPOSITORIES’ option to create a report.

I only selected the ‘ADDRESS’ and ‘NOTE” report options and generated a report I saved the resulting report as a PDF.

Before merging the repositories, I elected to go to the FILE menu and make a backup. By having the pdf report and a backup, I am ready to attempt the ‘merge all’ option. And nothing was merged.

Since two of my known duplicates have different names, I didn’t expect the ‘merge all’ to merge them. However, it thought the Ancestry repositories would get merged.

Looking at the ‘Edit Repository’ information for my two Ancestry entries found that one had information entered for the website while the other did not.

After I copied the web address from the one Ancestry entry into the address for the second Ancestry entry, the ‘Merge All Duplicate Repositories’ merged them into one entry. Thus, it appears that the information has to be exactly the same for two repositories to get merged.

Since my duplicate repositories for the Ford County Register of Deeds did not merge, I tried the following:

  • Decided which repository name to keep – Ford County Kansas Register of Deeds
  • Copied that Repository name to the name of the repository I wanted to merge with that original
  • Pulled down the 3 vertical dot menus and ran the ‘Merge All … ‘ function

This merged my Ford County Register of Deeds Repositories.

I tried a similar task with my duplicate repositories for the Kansas Office of Vital Statistics. This time, I made sure the name was the same, but I changed the address on one by removing the name of the state. When I tried the merge feature again, these duplicate repositories were NOT merged. Thus, it is likely the information in the Repository fields also must match.

Since I don’t have very many duplicates, getting the two records to look alike and then running the ‘Merge All …’ function will work.

PLACES

Merging Places in RM8 is very similar to merging places in RM7. From the list of places, select (and thus highlight) the place you would like to keep.

Click on the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the Places section to open the menu.

Click on MERGE PLACES to open the ‘SELECT PLACE’ window.

Put a check mark by the place you want to merge INTO the selected place and click OK. Continue working thru your list of places.

Place Details

Since place details are associated with a specific place, they will have to be merged one place at a time. Fortunately, I do not have a lot of places with details. On the places screen, there is a column titled ‘Details’ that indicates the number of place details associated with that place.

If I click on the > next to the number of details for a place (in my case, 118 for Dodge City), it opens a slide-out screen listing those Place Details.

On this screen, I can see how often the Place Detail was used.

On the ‘EDIT PLACE DETAIL’ portion of the screen, there is a > next to the events. Clicking on the > opens a slide-out that lists the events using that Place Detail

In my list of PLACE DETAILS for Dodge City, I have quite a few that could be merged. Clicking on the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the Place Details screen reveals a menu with the option to MERGE PLACE DETAILS.

With the PLACE DETAIL that you want to keep HIGHLIGHTED, click on the 3 vertical dots and then on the menu item to open the SELECT PLACE window. (Be sure to have the place you want to keep selected (highlighted) before clicking on the menu.)

The Select Place Menu indicates that I am selecting PLACES TO MERGE WITH THIS ONE and then lists the place detail that I had highlighted.

Then select the ‘place details’ from the list that you wish to merge.

Click OK. The selected place details are now merged. Continue the same process with other place details.

I merged my PLACE DETAILS prior to working on my PLACES. As I was working my way thru the list, I realized that some of the places I need to merge have lots of place details associated with them. Thus, I believe it would be more time efficient to merge places first and then place details.