Chances are if you've been using Ancestry for a long time
and have a large family tree, your family tree needs a tune
up and today, we're going to use Family Tree Maker to clean
up one messy part of your family tree. Howdy, I'm Devon
Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics and I like helping you
climb your family tree and have fun along the way. And when your
family tree is a mess, it's not very fun. So one of the things
you're going to see as you're going through this list is that
there's a lot of gobbledygook taking place. This can be parenthesis.
It could be extra commas. You're going to see the use of
United States. You're going to see the use of abbreviations as
we scroll down the list. I'm sure you're going to see
inconsistent British America, British Colonial America,
British colonies, British North America. You're going to see
this one for Kentucky brackets and bonus commas. You're
going to see USA. You're going to see a lot. Now you
might be thinking to yourself. why are the place names so
messed up? The ones I'm about to show you. The reason is the
larger your tree the more you have been using Ancestry to
bring in places from member trees, from recordsets.
There are no standards across all of the record collections.
There's no standard across trees. And sometimes we get a
little lazy and we get inconsistent. And that's okay.
And that's why we want to use a tool like Family Tree Maker to
clean it all up. One of the first things you will want to
do when you're cleaning up place names is to get to the
resolve conflicts list. And this is where you're going to
standardize United States, the USA standardize some of that
Kentucky and so forth. So, what we need to do is we need to
come to this section right here and going to click on this
check mark over a piece of paper. It's to the right of
when it says places. So scroll to the right. Click on that
icon right there. And then it's going to ask you if you want to
back up the file. The larger the file the more cleanup
you're going to do the more I recommend Yes. If you think
there's just one or two cleanup places then I'm going to say
don't worry about it. So then you're going to have a pop-up
screen that says resolve all place names. When we zoom in
it's going to take new in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that has
the United States and turn it into USA. Possible Ohio, United
States becomes Ohio, USA/ Do you want to do that Franklin County,
Ohio, United States or Franklin County, Ohio, USA? Now you have
complete control over this list now this list had over 1,000
names to correct. So take your time and go slow. We can simply
say, "yes. I want to have it be like that." And now it's not
going to use that name. It's going to use this name for
possible Ohio and United States. It goes to Ohio, United States.
There's no way to customize this. That's one of the things I
don't like about this. Maybe you want it to standardize to Ohio,
USA but you still want to keep that possible. There isn't a way
to do that. So go ahead and leave the checkmark right
there. here's another example , Perry. Ohio, United States.
We want it to go to that. So you can keep going down and
checking all of these marks. So, here's an example. Portland
Township, Sandeski City, Ward one, Erie County, Ohio, United
States. You can't see it because it runs off. Family
Tree Maker wants to clip it to Ohio, United States, but you have
extra details. You have that Portsmouth Township. You have
the Erie at the Ward 1. And so one of the things you can do is
click on DESC. So, what happens is the unrecognized text is
going to go into the description field that Ancestry
provides. So, what we can do is click on that. So, keep going
through the list searching for the things that you want to
correct. I want to caution you when you use the place checker.
Look at this entry. Long Beach, California, United States. The
suggestion is Long Beach, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Notice how Family Tree Maker made a recommendation of what
the county could be. I kind of like that tool but be careful
because there are boundary changes and you may be using
the wrong county from the recommended list. So in that
case you'll probably want to click ignore. But in this case
I really like that Family Tree Maker found the county for me.
So I'm going to keep going. Here's another example of
something I don't like. And I don't recommend you changing
right away. So Hannover was part of a lot of different locations
before 1871 when it became part of Germany. And notice here's
Hanover trying to be historically accurate perhaps
and then Family Tree Maker is trying to switch it to this.
I'm going to recommend again this is one of those times
where you click ignore and then go and see if it's historically
accurate before you go and connect in. Now, for those of
you from Ireland you need to help me settle this debate. Is
Dublin in the right county for Ireland or is it misattributed
in the file? Notice how the automatic resolve page wants to
force it to just say Ireland but you're thinking wait, "I
did discover that it was in Dublin. I just might have the
formatting of the location wrong." So again we're going to
click ignore and keep going. I'm hoping these examples are
helping you see why you can't just accept the automatic
correct all place names because you might be losing data that
you already found. How frustrated will you be if
you've discovered that your ancestor lived in Dublin but
this resource forced it into Ireland and you lost that
information. Now, I have a number of ancestors from Canada
and Family Tree Maker wants me to take off the village that I
found in Lincoln County, Ontario, Canada and just remove it
completely. Now it does give me the option of putting Smith and
Gainesboro over into the description but it is part of
that location. So it's a little bit frustrating that it's
asking me to do that. So once again ignore. Tell me in the
comments some of the other things that you have found with
the automatic recommendation of cleaning up the trees that you
think that's not right. Going through a thousand place names
was really challenging but I made it and now I'm ready to
click okay. Now another way to clean up places is as you're
working or as you come across a place name here in the window.
So I found a place Valley Crossing, Hamilton Township,
Franklin County, Ohio, United States. It's going to affect
four people and four facts. So what I want to do is double
click on George Washington. And what will bring me to this
profile page. The birth fact is highlighted and if it isn't you
just click on it. And then to the right you're going to see
where you can edit the location. But how do you know
what should survive? I'm going to go over to the Family
Search Wiki and I'm going to start with Franklin County.
Then I'm going to go to the townships. There are some
villages. There's Valley View, Georgeville. There's no Valley
Crossing. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on Hamilton
Township and unfortunately, Hamilton Township survives but
there is no Valley Crossing. One more thing I'm going to try
to do is I'm going to try to do Valley Crossing and do a search
for Valley Crossing in the Wiki. I'm still not coming up
with anything on the Wikipedia or on the Family Search Wiki.
So, I am going to keep Hamilton and put Valley Crossing in the
description. So, all I have to do is take out Valley Crossing,
click the Hamilton and now, there is this pop-up screen. It
looks like that. When we zoom in, this is the old place name.
This is the new place name and we want to click on add
description text to the field. And then we're going to that
valley crossing right there and get rid of any spaces or commas
because when it shows up, it will show up with the comma so
we don't need to have those extra things there but come up
to the top. There will be times when you make a change in a
profile to someone and you just want to affect that one person.
Other times, you're going to want to change all four
instances because why bother doing all the changes when you
can do it at one> Click in the radio dial that is besides change
all instances. Come down to okay. And then you're going to see
Hamilton Township, Franklin County, Ohio, United States.
Valley Crossing after United States- there is a semi colon
just in this view but that's not how it's going to show up
on Ancestry or any other location. It's a really great
way to keep track of the additional location information
and the additional information about individuals. But as we're
looking at this we're seeing there is a , Franklin
County, Ohio and then there's a Hamilton, Franklin, Ohio. And it
looks like that all of the Hamiltons in Franklin County,
Ohio should have that township right next to it. So we don't
have to go back out to the place name field we can change
it here in all instances that have that Hamilton without the
township can be affected. So come over here and let's go
ahead and copy that location. Click back on this Hamilton do
a paste right there. And notice it gives you a prompt says, "this
is already in the database. Is that the one you want to use?"
Click yes and we can go ahead and change all instances to
this new place. Click on change and go okay. One of the things
to keep in mind is that Family Tree Maker is dependent on the
standards over on Ancestry. And after using the program for a
while and using Ancestry for a number of years it seems that
they use USA for United States. They prefer to have Germany
attached to all Germanic states even in the time period before
that. They like Canada. They don't like the use of Upper Canada
and Canada West. So you're going to have to make some
decisions as we're going through. The other thing I'm
going to do while we're here is we're going to change all of
these to USA. So we're going to make it say townships with USA.
Click okay. And 75 place names are going to be affected. Click
okay. This one is improved but I'm going to go ahead and fix
these while we're here. So now when we go back to places and
we look for Hamilton Township, Marion, Truo, Madison. I bet
what we're going to find is they're going to be underneath
that USA. So scroll down to USA. Click on the arrow for
Ohio. Click on the arrow for Franklin and we're going to
find Galloway, Hamilton Township, Madison, Marion,
Prairie, and Truro. And all of those are clustered together.
Before we continue, if you're finding a lot of great value
out of this video, be sure to leave a comment or question
below and then share it with other users of Family Tree
Maker or potential users of Family Tree Maker so they can
clean up their Ancestry tree. One of the things I do like
about Family Tree Maker being so connected to Ancestry and
not so much to writing to FamilySearch is that after your done
making all the changes to your tree you can come up to the
Ancestry syncing icon. Click on that and then you're going to
have sync. Now sync options: unlink tree- we want sync. Now
you'll have a screen that says continue to sync and then it
will go through the syncing process. It will let you know if
there are any problems that may take place or how many changes
are going to be maked to the tree. Uou can come and click
continue. And then those changes are going to be implemented all
at the same time over on Family Tree Maker to Ancestry. So
it's kind of handy. So what do you think? Will you be able to
clean up your family tree? I hope so! And if you're ready for
another video that might interest you be (oops no sound!)