Mass-renaming people

lelmon

Sometimes automatically imported people have strange name misspellings, one example is this person I found via the RLL's "five a day" project: GXBH-7XS

Everyone in his immediate family has their surname written as "Koelb?". Having to edit them one by one to change them to either "Koelb" or "Koebl" is somewhat painful given there's seven of them with this exact issue. It would be much more convenient if there were some way to edit multiple people's names at once when an issue like this occurs. I'm not sure how exactly selection of people to edit would work (particularly if it were more than just people in an immediate family), but a screen that's a simple 2-column list of everyone with the name text boxes + a save button at the bottom would probably be enough for the editing page, I'd imagine.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

Oh great, another unsupervised project to join the Census Projects. https://fiveaday.rll.byu.edu/

dlmelville

I agree with Aine .... these "project" are contributing to the "junk genealogy" that is becoming the norm in the family tree. Sorry ....

Sam Sulser

Here's my take on this one. Yes, the person was created and the US 1910 census attached by the USCensusProject. It appears that the index for that census record contained the spelling in question and the person who added the family entered the name exactly as it was in the index. Indexers are taught to use ? and * to replace letters they can't read and the person who added it just used what the index showed.

As to the suggestion....there are times when you need to make a surname change for a whole family although not often. Usually if there was an error made in an index that made its way to the person's page as in this case. This function does exist when you edit an index on a record. It will ask if you want to assign the change to the other members of the household. We can certainly ask if this can be done on the person page.

Sam 🤨