Gramps version 5.1.5 OS Linux Mx
I have found out that I misspelt a surname of all the members of a family. Is there a way to correct the spelling and have it corrected for all the members of that family without having to correct the spelling for each individual? TIA
I know no tool or plugin to do it easily.
For me, there is no correct spelling. I always record the birth name, so I can have a different spelling in the same family.
The spelling in my case is that all the same family names are spelt the same way but incorrectly. They are all listed under the same title so I thought that if I could find a way to change the title surname all the surnames under that title would be changed.
Unfortunately you can’t. A name and all its components are “private” data in a Person record. A “name”, if considered as a record by itself, cannot be shared between persons (design choice). Consequently, you’re doomed to edit every person.
In addition, in old records, you can never be sure about a name spelling because they were written in an essentially oral society. Spelling would highly depend on the culture and literacy of the clerk. The same person may be designated with a spelling at birth, another one at marriage and even another one at death, not speaking of the records for children birth. My practice is to record all these variants as alternate names, birth name being the main one.
Thank you for the explanation. I hoped there was a way but understand why there can’t be. I’ll deal with it.
The Name Editor Tool and Name Merge Tool addons are specifically for harmonizing names.
They are available through the Isotammi project’s list of Addons for Gramps.
As with all tools that do mass edits, MAKE A BACKUP before using this tool.
They appear quite similar. The Name Editor has powerful search & replace and could be complex to learn. The Name Merge ensure that the names will match an existing one.
(Looks like there are a couple untranslated Finnish labels in the Name Merge. Here’s Google Translate’s interpretation: Nimiä = Names ; Henkilöikä = Personal age. I have NO idea what “personal age” could mean. )
But @kku , @PeterPower , @jpek-m , and @TimNal could tell us if we’re missing an alternative (besides SuperTool… which can do almost anything!) The Isotammi project has been coordinating efforts of multiple users towards a collective genealogical project. So they have a lot of tools for normalizing and merging data.
Export to a text format (e.g. a ‘gramps’ file), do a search-and-replace (uncompressing and then recompressing if necessary), and then reimport.
Brian, it is “Henkilöitä”, not “Henkilöikä” and it means simply “Persons” (or People), ie. “The number of people”. Will be fixed at some point.
ti 14. maalisk. 2023 klo 13.56 Brian McCullough via The Gramps Project (Discourse Forum & Mailing List) (notifications@gramps.discoursemail.com) kirjoitti:
1 Like
We have a case worse, a family name that is spelt differently, with a C in “proper French” and with a Q in the regional language “Auvergnat”. Before 1850, in most records which contain the name more than once, there are both spellings in the same single document.
When editing, it is a royal pain to have the individuals in two hierarchies. I’m not sure how to fix this.
In the Name Editor, there is the Group As option. It allows bringing various spellings of a surname into the grouping. In the example I used was some branches of a family using “Clarke” while most stayed with “Clark”
1 Like
The Grouping override is very useful for collating Surname variants. But unfortunately, there isn’t a corresponding “ignore surname on Group subSort” functionality.
So your Grouped ‘Smith/Smythe/Smyth’ will have separate subgroupings for each Surname Variant (and each multiple Surname combo) subsorted on each Given name.
This why I set my default display name to Given Surname. This brings John Clark together with John Clarke. This has the additional benefit of having the name displayed in reports without the comma.
I had forgotten about this fix. It should be merged into the code.