Globally change surnames in a Group

RootsMagic
,
1

I have a fairly large group of people of Scottish ancestry, and I want to globally change their surnames from “Mac” to “Mc”. Can this be done? If so, how?

I know that there will be readers who don’t think that there is any difference between the two spellings, but I submit that there IS a considerable difference to those who are descendants of those names. No flames, please. I just want a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer, and in the case of the former, a simple explanation of how to perform the change.

Thanks in advance

2

There is a Search and Replace that would make it easy to change all “Mac” to “Mc” in surnames. But there is not a way to limit the change to a group.

3

use this but I would Color Code your Group first so that you get them all plus you don’t pick up any you don’t want

4

Search and Replace cannot be limited automatically based on a group or color coding. I think MadDog’s suggestion is to use Search and Replace but not to use the Replace All function. Rather, use Search and Replace to do them one at a time and then you can make the decision as to whether each name in turn is for somebody in your group. It’s a little tedious, but it’s nowhere near as tedious as going into Edit Person for each person in your group. The advantage of color coding would be that you as the user would not be able to see the group as you go through the Search and Replace one person at a time, but you should be able to see the color coding.

This is a case where a really nice RM8 enhancement would be to enable Search and Replace to be filtered by a group.

5

The other “how” would be to do it outside of the RM UI using SQLite on your database.

Another, and this is a maybe, might be to export the group with a bare minimum of data, use search and replace in a text editor, and then… I’m unsure… might require more effort than the Search/Replace within the UI. The automatic ShareMerge would likely keep the original if imported into the main database. If imported into a separate one and using File Compare, there would be a lot of steps for each one.

6

Thanks to everyone who replied. I used the Search and Replace function on the People List page, and just changed the entire surname, matching the case, so that MacM changed to McM.