I am cleaning up the Place List in my database. I have several places that duplicate entries in the Gazetteer, like “Canton, Stark, Ohio, United States”. I do not need Canton in the Place List so I would like to delete it and have the facts referring to Canton use the gazetteer directly. How can I do this in bulk, or should I just give up and geocode the entry in the Place List and live with the duplication?
The Gazetteer is an optional external database program that RootsMagic does not use or reference directly. It provides a fixed list of place names in the same way as using Google Maps/Bing Maps/MapQuest/other means of place name search… where the user must indirectly “copy” and then “paste” into RM’s Places faculty (which are stored directly in the RootsMagic database).
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Based on that I just tried an experiment and I see what you mean. I added a Residence fact with a place that is in the gazetteer but not Places. This added the new location to Places, although it does not show the coordinates. If I change to map view, though, the new place shows up on the map where it should.
The conclusion, then, is that I can leave the place entries that match the gazetteer alone.
When you start typing a place name into a new fact, RM does not use the Gazetteer to make suggestions unless you tell it to use the Gazetteer. What it does instead is to make suggestions based on your own place list. It brings up the places from your existing place list that most closely matching the place name you are typing in.
Generally speaking, you should not be deleting place names from your database whether they match anything in Gazetteer or not unless the place names you are deleting are not used. But even if you do delete a place name that is unused and then start typing that same place name into a new fact, then RM will not use Gazetteer to provide you with a suggestion unless you click on the Gazetteer icon.
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