The function in genealogy software for Mac, Reunion 9 that “remembers” recently typed place names and surnames and “types” them for you upon further use is called speed names. This auto-population occurs in the edit person and edit family windows as well as in lists, when you begin typing a surname or place name. The characters you type are compared to the beginning of the names in the list (sorted alphabetically). The first name that begins with the same characters that have been typed are suggested. The suggested name can be accepted by pressing the enter (return) or tab key. One can press the down-arrow key to select the next name in the list as sorted alphabetically and the up-arrow to select the predecessor. This seemingly mundane speed names function is a convenience and source of efficiency.
The lists of surnames and place names lists are separate. Each can grow up to 2000 names in length. When a speed name is added to a list that already at the 2000 name maximum, Reunion 9 drops the oldest, least recently used name in that list to make room. The lists can be edited by hand in the speed names preference panel (as demonstrated in this video.
I'm afraid the Video did not function
Ben, I noticed on your place name list that the top few entries began with 1,2,or 3 commas. How do you use them
?
This video would not load for me. I shut off the computer, restarted and it still wouldn't load. We just got the screen and the Quick Time logo.
This happened to me on another of your videos, but on trying it on a later day, it worked fine!
My computer is a 24″ IMac, less than a year old, only a start on the 320G hard drive, 2G of Ram etc. I don't think it is a compute malfunction.
Thought you should know.
Dell Egilson
This video would not load for me. I shut off the computer, restarted and it still wouldn't load. We just got the screen and the Quick Time logo.
This happened to me on another of your videos, but on trying it on a later day, it worked fine!
My computer is a 24″ IMac, less than a year old, only a start on the 320G hard drive, 2G of Ram etc. I don't think it is a compute malfunction.
Thought you should know.
Dell Egilson
I could not get the video to run either. – pb
I am wondering too about the commas that you use in place names……. mrstucci
Well one good use of commas in place names is it is clear then what part of the place name each one is – city, county, state, country – I'm dealing with this right now working on adding someone else's data to the Clan Moffat Society genealogy file I keep with trying to determine where
Knox, Missouri, USA
is – is it” Knox Co., Missouri, USA” or is it “Knox, Polk Co., Missouri, USA” And
, Union, Ohio
is quite a different place from
Union, , Ohio
This was one thing that got me really steamed about Reunion when I discovered it had happened – sadly way too long after it had happened to try for a do over. Reunion used to, with no questions asked and no warning given, strip out leading and consecutive commas from place names on a GEDCOM import, so as I went through a file that had over 13,000 place names in it trying to bring order to the chaos, this (Union, Ohio) was but one example of what I encountered. The original data in the GEDCOM file from PAF had both of those places for Union in it, but Reunion had kindly turned them all into
Union, Ohio.
So I then had no way to know which ones were Union Co., Ohio, and which ones were the place called Union in Montgomery Co. There were thousands of instances of this or similar throughout my file.
Personally I don't rely on the comma count per sé to tell me what each entity in a place is – I don't use a leading comma for an absent place, and I don't use multiple commas if I don't know an entity. But for US place names I always put Co. after the county name to make it obvious, so if I don’t know the County I will use “? Co.” with a note in the memo giving what the choices of county are for that place name in that state.
And I ALWAYS end a place name with a country, so that any software which counts place entities backwards from the end of the place, stopping at each comma will always get all the countries together on a page like here
http://genealogy.clanmoffat.org/places-all.php?…
and then when you click on any country link, you see all of the major divisions within that country – in the USA you see the States, in Scotland you see the Counties, etc.
So if a place starts with 3 commas, that means it's a country – eg , , , Canada from Ben's list, and in my system I’d enter Canada and it would still show as a country because (firstly it’s kind of obvious) but secondly counting from the right it is the first entity before a , is detected, and so must be a country.
Each to his own, but those are my rules, and if everybody who ever was going to send me data to include in the Clan Moffat Society file followed them I’d have a lot more time to do other less boring things than tidying up the place names in a file before I import it
Roger