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Using Ditto Shortcuts to Enter Surnames and Place Names with One Keystroke

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How efficient are you at entering surnames and place names in genealogy software, Reunion 9 for Mac? Did you know you can enter even very long names in only one keystroke? You can with the ditto shortcut feature and a little help from me.

The help comes by way of this video from the MacGenealogist Archives, Using Ditto Shortcuts to Enter Surnames and Place Names in the Reunion for Macintosh Genealogy Software, in which I show you how to master this efficiency feature. I also share a couple gotchas, so you’ll want to watch this short video even if you already use ditto shortcuts.

Date Feasibility Checking in Reunion 9

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Reunion 9 for Mac includes a feature that helps you eliminate mistakes in genealogy event dates. It’s called date feasibility checking and it has two modes: interactive and report. Interactive date feasibility rules are evaluated whenever a birth, marriage, or death event is changed. The whole set of rules is evaluated when a date feasibility report is generated. Feasibility checking can ferret out typos and mistakes like setting a person’s marriage event to a date after their death date. Ugh, that’s nasty!

In this video from the MacGenealogist Archives, Date Feasibility Checking in Reunion 9 for Mac Genealogy Software, I take you step-by-step through each setting and show you what effect it has in genealogy software Reunion 9 for Mac.

Find and Replace Names with Accented Letters in Reunion 9

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An often overlooked feature in Reunion 9 is find and replace. I think this is because we tend to use the Find button on the toolbar instead of using the Find | Anything menu item.

At the bottom of the Find menu is a item called Replace…. It enables you to find and replace all occurrences of one piece of text with another. The search text can be sensitive to lower and upper case. It can limit the changes to marked people. It can also apply the change to all fields, or all source fields, or limit it to one these selected fields:

  • First and middle names
  • Last names
  • All names
  • Addresses
  • Places
  • Memos
  • Facts
  • Notes
  • Structured source fields
  • Free form source fields

One example of a use for this feature is replacing names without properly accented letters with an appropriately accented name. In this video from the MacGenealogist Archives, Find and Replace Names with Accented Letters in Reunion 9 for Mac Genealogy Software, I’ll show you how to make such a change without having to visit each family card. Along the way I’ll show you how to insert accented characters when the need arises.

The Secret to Correcting and Preventing Broken Photo and Multimedia Links in Reunion 9

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Moving genealogy photos and other multimedia files around can wreak havoc on Reunion 9. This is because Reunion stores links to the files in the family file rather than duplicating the files. This is a good thing because it preserves disk space on your Mac, but it can result in broken links if you move your files after adding them to Reunion.

You’re gonna love this! A simple preference setting can eliminate this problem for you. If you use the GenealogyTools recommended folder structure it can correct existing broken links and prevent them in the future. If you use a different folder structure this tip is still effective. It just means you’ve got to figure out for yourself what folders to configure in the preference setting. Let me show you how it’s done. Just watch this video from the MacGenealogist Archives:

In it I demonstrate the problem and how to make the preference change that will correct and prevent it in the future.

Capturing Quality of Genealogy Data in Reunion for Mac

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Analyzing the quality of a cited source is important to reaching sound genealogical conclusions. This is true not only when you initially record the source information and reach a conclusion, but in the future. You may find information that contradicts what you have and need to reconsider the soundness of your conclusion. The source quality is also relevant to other genealogists and historians as they consider your conclusions. For these reasons it is best to record the quality with the information in your genealogy software.
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