This may be genealogic sacrilege, but I’d like to turn off the country whenever i enter a place name. RM always asks if I want to update the name to include “United States,” and I’m tired of having to answer this every time. Is there a way to turn this off? I’ve looked and can’t seem to find an option. Using RM11 on Windows 11.
Thanks.
Turn off County Check.
I realize it’s “Country Check” you are worried about instead of County Check. But there is no “Country Check” option, and including the country is a part and parcel of the County Check feature which is producing standardized place names.
I hate the place name standard which is supported by RM with the intensity of 1000 suns. The standard is not going to go away. So I just turn off its enforcement.
LOL. Nothing like a morning laugh with my coffee to start my day 
So more than 1,000 suns but slightly less than a power of a Tesseract?
Thanks, Jerry. I’ll try that.
Have not tried yet, just saw the nessage, does doing that eliminate the United States thing? I was told I had to do a find/replace to go from United States to U.S. as only solution
For any places that are already out there, you would still need to do the Search/Replace. Or you could go through the Place List by hand. Going through the Place List by hand wouldn’t be as fast as Search/Replace, but it still would be much faster than going to the Edit Screen for each person.
The big advantage for turning County Check off would be for new places you add to the database.
Sort the Places in Reverse Order so its US, state, county, city
Make a Backup
Run the Search/Replace
As logical as that seems, I think there is a bit of a problem with it. Namely, when the Place List is sorted in forward order, you are seeing what is really in the database. But when the Place List is sorted in reverse order, you are not seeing what is really in the database. Not seeing what is really in the database can make it hard to set up the Search and Replace.
For example, if I were including United States as the country, I might have place names that end in things such as Tennessee, United States or Virginia, United States - that sort of thing. So to get rid of United States, I would actually have to replace , United States with a null string to be sure I got rid of the comma and the space before the United States.
I can see the comma and the space when the Place List is sorted in forward order. I cannot see the comma and the space when the Place List is sorted in reverse order. But they are still there and they still need to be deleted. If all you do is to replace United States with a null string, then the place names you changed would have a dangling comma and space that would be impossible to get rid of with Search and Replace. You would have to fix them one at a time.
Since the Search & Replace for a specific edit of replacing United States with U.S. can be done completely without even having the Place list open, I took the suggestion for Reversing the Place names as the easiest and quickest way to verify the after result.
Yes by Reverse Sorting you can see if you have United States or United States of America or USA and in the side panel just copy , xyz into the Search/Replace.
If you were to Search/Replace , United States you could be left over with , of America. For me it’s easier to see using Reverse Sort.
With them grouped this way, I can see who I want to work on first.
If any happen to have an entry error of 2 commas, those will be grouped and can be fixed on a 1 to 1 basis along with those that may not have a comma or a space before country.
Some may only have the country so you wouldn’t want to replace them.
And then there is US of America or United State no S
That is the beauty of RM, multiple ways to do things
Turning off “County Check” solved the problem. Most of the places in my database are in the US and I don’t need that to show in the location. At some point, I’ll edit the DB using one of the methods suggested in this thread to remove “United States” from existing entries. Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions. What a great community!
Feature Request : I use Places > Tools > PlaceClean to remove country names I don’t want. I would like to see the Add or remove country section of the dialog changed so that when I type in the name of the country I want to remove - in my case ‘United Kingdom’ then RM remembers it so I don’t have to re-type it again next time (it’s not just people in the US who use RM). Please.
Confirming request was submitted to add ‘United Kingdom’ to the drop list options on add/remove country.
Warning: If you regularly sync your RM with Ancestry, when you do a universal place change like this and go to sync, it will prompt you that that has changed and no longer matches whatever was there before. It may not be a big deal to you….but then again, it may.
I used to periodically do a search/replace to shorten “United States of America” and '“United States” to USA. Then I decided to eliminate USA entirely because when doing a narrative report it is annoyingly repetitive and adds characters, which adds pages. I put a disclaimer in the beginning of my narrative that all places are in the USA, unless otherwise noted. I am not concerned with other repercussions of sorting, etc. my place names.
I have long done the same thing and for the same reasons. However, I would really prefer a different way of doing it. Namely, I really wish there was a way that I could store the country name in my database in all cases but not have the country appear in printed reports when the country is United States. It’s seems to me that in addition to sentence templates for facts and source templates for sources, we also need place templates for places. The place templates would in some way be able to turn off the printing of country names in some cases. For example, in my case I would be able t turn off the printing of United States while keeping the printing of countries like Canada and Ireland.
Agreed. In the Place there is the Name that is displayed & printed, Standard Name and then Abbrev Name.
For Printing it would be nice if the Option to print the Abbrev Name was in place. Users could enter what they would like to actually be printed.
I don’t enter USA or versions of it however I do have Ireland, Germany, etc.
If I wanted just Abbeyfeale, Ireland to print that would be in the Abbrev Name. While Abbeyfeale, County Limerick, Ireland would be shown on the Edit screen.
And don’t get me started on Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania - just make it Philly LOL
It is available using Place:Short in the Fact/Role sentences. It would save a lot of effort if it could be selected as an option in the print dialog to use the functionality globally in a report rather than having to edit every fact sentence in the database.
Yes that’s what I said.
