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Using Find/Replace on Place names deletes all your geocodes for those places

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    Using Find/Replace on Place names deletes all your geocodes for those places

    In leading a Reunion User Group today, we were using the Help Manual to learn about mapping and geocoding. We learned that if you have a Place geocoded, and then you make a change to the Place name (such as a spelling correction) in the Places sidebar, the geocoding will not change. BUT, if you are in a person's Edit Panel, and you make a change in the Places field, if you had previously geocoded that Place, the geocoding would go away and you'd need to get the coordinates again.

    Okay fine, that's good to know. But then, someone mentioned that I typed out the word Pennsylvania in Place names, but using PA would be shorter and not make chart boxes as wide when making a chart. Since I was using a dummy family file, I decided to demonstrate Find and Replace. I changed all instances of Pennsylvania in the Place field to PA.

    But then when looking back at the Places sidebar a few minutes later, now none of them in Pennsylvania were geocoded, i.e., they had lost their geocoding. One of the group members suggested that using Find and Replace had probably eliminated them all. In other words, the Find and Replace acted as if I was changing the Place names within the Place fields in the Edit Person panel, NOT as if I was just changing the spelling in the Places sidebar.

    Is this a correct interpretation of why I lost the geocoding on all the Pennsylvania places? If so, this little extra fact should be added to the Help Manual, so those who care a lot about using geocoding will be forewarned.

    #2
    Your interpretation is correct.

    Reunion maintains a database of place records, which can be viewed from the Places Sidebar. Each place record contains the place name, geocodes and comments and is connected to from one or more event fields.

    When you rename an event place from the Edit Person pane, that event will point to a new or different record in the places database. If the old place name has no more instances in your family file then that place name record will be deleted along with the geocodes and comments. If the new event place name is already present in your family file then the geotags and comments for that new place record will apply to that place. When a new place name record is created the geotag and comments fields are blank.

    When you rename places from the sidebar, you're modifying existing place name records which will not remove geocodes and comments because place name records are not being deleted or added.

    Getting back to your point: Find and Replace behaves like editing place names from the Edit Person pane and not like editing place names in the Places Sidebar - therefore, if Find and Replace results in a place name that is new to your family file the geocodes field will be blank. However, if Find and Replace results in a place name that's already in your family file and contains geocodes, then geocodes will not be lost.
    Gregg Witmer
    Leister Productions, Inc.

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