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Loss of accented letters after merge?

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    Loss of accented letters after merge?

    I am doing research into the biological parents of my grandfather, who was adopted by a Phelps family shortly after his birth in 1894, in Assumption Parish, Louisiana. Mismatches in yDNA put me onto this mystery eight years ago, and atDNA has pointed me in this direction for research, providing two families to look at -- Blanchard and Boudreaux.

    I created two separate family files for the trees of the likely father and likely mother. Both of these families are Acadians/Cajuns, whose names are often written with accent marks from the French usage.

    Yesterday, I finally reached a point where I could merge the two files into one, and work with a single Acadian tree for my grandfather's ancestors. The merge went very smoothly, and merging duplicated people was a piece of cake. It all seemed to go well, or at least I thought so until this morning when I looked at my grandfather's father's name (Télèma). I discovered that the accent marks on his name, and all other such names, had all been cleared the data base. His name is now simply Telema.

    I know this sounds like a minor deal, but to me, having the properly accented letters is important to portray the French nature of these family members. Why wouldn't Reunion simply carry over the ACSII characters as stored in each data base?? It seems like such a simple thing to do.

    Anyway, I'm extremely disappointed, because I now have to go through the data base and correct each name individually. Worse yet, eventually, I have to merge this family file with my main family file to finally integrate my grandfather's biological family tree with the rest of mine. And then I will have to do the character conversion all over again!

    Please let me know this is something you can fix!

    P.S. Isn't there a global find and replace feature in Reunion that would allow me to repair this damage in the fewest steps?
    Mike Phelps
    Goodyear, AZ
    Researching: PHELPS, WATKINS, SPENCER, ALSFASSER, WEMHOENER, BLANCHARD, MARQUETTE, CHAVEZ, VALENZUELA

    #2
    Re: Loss of accented letters after merge?

    Follow up: I did locate the "find and replace" option, inconspicuously placed at the bottom of the Find pane. So this may not be as bad as I thought to correct the names that were altered. Also, it turns out some of the characters did make it over properly. The first few I had checked, that was not the case. But as I went through the entire list I saw some had made it over. No real pattern as to what made it and what didn't. Kind of random.
    Mike Phelps
    Goodyear, AZ
    Researching: PHELPS, WATKINS, SPENCER, ALSFASSER, WEMHOENER, BLANCHARD, MARQUETTE, CHAVEZ, VALENZUELA

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      #3
      Re: Loss of accented letters after merge?

      Originally posted by mwphelps View Post
      Isn't there a global find and replace feature in Reunion that would allow me to repair this damage in the fewest steps?
      I'm not sure why this is occurring in your merge, but it certainly isn't the expected behavior - I haven't encountered any problems in merging files full of people with diacritical marks in their names. A font problem? Going thru GEDCOM rather than merging Family Files natively, and choosing incompatible character sets? Something else?

      But absolutely if no one has a suggestion to avoid this, the global find and replace is the way to go.

      [1] select "Find" from the Navbar
      [2] click "Find and Replace..." (the bottom button)
      [3] replace all occurrences of "Telema" with "Télèma" in All people; Where = Last names; How = Whole words only.

      Of course you'd have to repeat this for each accented name.
      Dennis J. Cunniff
      Click here to email me

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