Locations - How to clean up the Master Location List

Often, through entering information and by importing records from other people you will end up with two or more variations of the same location in the Master Location List. These are spelled a little bit differently. For example, you might end up with:

Pompton Pl., Morris, NJ
Pompton Plains, Morris, N.J.
Pompton Plains, Morris, NJ
Pompton Plains, Morris Co., NJ
Pompton Plains, Morris, New Jersey
Pompton Plains, Morris, New Jersey, United States
Pompton Plains, Morris, New Jersey, USA

All of these locations are obviously the same place and should be combined into just one good place name.  We are not telling you that you must cleanup your Master Location List, but it doing so brings some very big payoffs.

• Cleaning up your Master Location List will make your family file more compact and efficient. 
  
• Merging duplicate individuals will go faster because you won't have variant locations to contend with. 
  
• Your reports and charts will also read more professionally and have more credibility because your place names are consistent throughout. 
  
• Do you include a Location Index in your book-style reports?  Your Location Index will be shorter (fewer sheets of paper) and less confusing when there is just one entry per location.
  
• Finding all the people in your family file using a particular location will be 100% accurate when you use the Show List button in the Master Location List because no one will be missed. 
  
• Your Locations Reports will also be shorter and easier to manage.
  

1. Start by opening your Master Location List.  Click on View > Master Lists > Location...



Or from the Individual's Information screen click the blue down arrow to the right of a location.

2. The Master Location List will then open.

3. You can speed up the cleanup process by clicking the Options button in the upper right and then clicking on Combine Duplicates... and also Purge Unused...

When done, you will have fewer locations to work with.

4. To combine multiple locations:

1. Choose one of the locations that you want to keep.  If it isn't exactly like you want it formatted, use the Edit button to fix it. See Locations and the Use of Commas for the formatting rules. This is now your "good" location name.
2. Highlight the variations in the list. Highlight the first bad location and then press and hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on each of the other spelling variations.  Each one will remain highlighted as you click the others.
3. Click the button at the bottom of the list.  The caption on the button will now change to read .
4. Highlight the "good" location line by clicking on it.
5. Click the button at the bottom.  All the "bad" locations are then combined with the "good" one and all the records in your family file that were pointing to the "bad" ones now point to the "good" one… (saving you potentially hours of editing).

You can see a free online video demonstration on combining locations by visiting http://www.millenniacorp.com/_videos/12step/12_step__preview.html. Although this video was created for Legacy 7, what it shown also applies to Legacy Family Tree 8.0.  These steps work the same for other Master Lists (with the exception of SourceWriter sources in the Master Source List).