About a year ago, I spent an hour or so merging all my duplicate place names. Today, I discover that I have many duplicates again. These are places I have worked in recently. What I am doing wrong that seems to create new/duplicate place names?
Are they truly duplicates … no misspellings, extra spaces or “.”, etc?
You may not be able to figure out where they came from, import gedcom, TreeShare, etc but I would look at each place and see who is using it in your file.
Could be a clue with the Edit Date showing for the person as to when it happened.
All inputs are my own. No gedcom imports, no TreeShare, etc. They are exact. I first noticed when adding an event and I had two choices for when I start to enter the place name.
Ok, so you are adding the duplicates.
1 Like
That seems likely, but I don’t know how I’m doing that.
1 Like
if for example you are Typing “Houston, Harris, Texas, United States” each time rather than selecting existing place – that will add a new placeID (with same name ) if you do that 10 times you likely will add 10 duplicates. WHen you begin typing it will display about 4-5 matches (first ones it finds for you to select from)
or hit the globe to find it
or the Gazetteer
When you have a place “Selected” it will tell you how many time used
Thank you, kevync1985. I will pay more attention to that instead of just typing in the place.
1 Like
the bottom line is to try to always pick an existing place.
You can merge duplicates but be very careful if/when you do (make sure you backup). I once mistakenly merged the same cityname in two diff states – I did not notice this till later – so that created a problem to fix 100’s manually or restore and lose a busy week worth of work. I now have over 10,000 unique places (31K people & 132K events)
The place is already in your database but you are not SELECTING it you are typing the place again thus making a duplicate.
Here is the video on Places - https://youtu.be/OLBL8zRB-5M
2 Likes
Another thing to check if a lot of duplicate names just appeared is that you are using the correct database. You may have cleaned one database but opened a different database afterwards.
1 Like
just clarifying you are not importing /sharing info into RM from Family Search or Ancestry – that can also cause places to get “messy”
I want to thank everyone who has commented on this issue. Obviously, it is a user-induced problem. Being a touch typist, I had using the mouse but I will be more diligent in clicking on the place already in the database. I have only one database and I do not share/download from any other site.
Sorry Kevin-- if you type it exactly the same each time, you will have just one instance of it in your database with how many times used-- BUT if you change one little thing such as add/ miss a comma or period, have an extra space especially at the very beginning, use or don’t use County or spell out the state/ use abbreviations such as IA and Ia etc --it will create a new place…
@LisaG As the guys said, it just easier to pick one from your dropdown menu that appears BUT like you I prefer to just type it out…