Hello,
Today I exported my database from ‘Personal Ancestral File’ to a .ged file and imported it in Gramps Project 5.1.4 (MacOS). It looks great but there is just one thing I can not solve in Gramps.
The first name and last name fields have switched. So Gramps shows every first name in the ‘Last name’ field and vice versa. Is there any solution for this? I hope someone can help me out with this problem.
Thanks already!
I converted from PAF to Gramps long ago, and I never saw this happen. Can you show an example of this?
I too migrated from PAF to Gramps.
PAF uses the back slash “/” to isolate the surname in PAF’s Full Name field. i.e. George /Washington/
In the PAF Preferences, check how you had the Names set up and that that convention was followed.
When the GEDCOM is created for export it creates the lines:
1 NAME George /Washington/
2 SURN Washington
2 GIVN George
Check the GEDCOM to see how it created the separation of the name into its components.
Sure. On the left side you can see how it’s showed in PAF and on the right you can see it in Gramps.
In that case it’s wrong in my PAF administration. There are all first names isolated with a ‘/’. Is there anything I can do about that except for adjusting them one by one?
You can edit the GEDCOM file.
Use a text editor and using Search and Replace in three steps:
Step 1. GIVN to GIVNBAD
Step 2. SURN to GIVN
Step 3. GIVNBAD to SURN
This assumes that all of your records in PAF were using the same naming convention. This should work. Famous last words.
Dave’s trick can help, but I’m not sure whether it works when you have prefixes like “van der” and suffixes like “sr.”. Do you have any in your person names, and if so, where are they?
I am also not sure whether GIVN and SURN override the full name format if that is not changed.
If I remember correctly, PAF did not account for surname prefixes. If the user included any prefix within the Surname slashes the GEDCOM created by PAF added it to the SURN label. Likewise if the prefix was before the surname slash, it was treated as part of the Given name.
PAF handled suffixes as anything outside the surname closing slash.
1 NAME Jonathan /Swift/ Jr
2 SURN Swift
2 GIVN Jonathan
2 NSFX Jr
Of course this will depend on how @Lkr28h handled suffixes in his non-conventional name setup in PAF
Now that you mention it, it’s true, because you can’t distinguish that part with slashes. And this means that many Dutch users, like my late dad, entered surnames as “van den /Bosch/”, to make sure that they are sorted by BOSCH, as they appear in our phone books.
I had a lot of names like that in Gramps, and wrote a simple .NET program (in C#) to extract these parts from the given names, and move them to a better location.
I just finished a test and Gramps apparently ignores the NAME label and used only the SURN, GIVN, and NSFX
I did the Search and Replace as described above on a GEDCOM created by PAF. Given and Surnames were swapped and any Suffix was handled correctly.
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