Family Historian User Group

Is there a way of bulk renaming source Titles? For instance, I wish to now have consistent Titles, I.e. some of my Birth sources are “Birth Certificate : name”, and “Birth : name”. In this case I would like to rename all the “Birth Certificate : name” to match “Birth : name” I tried editing each source individually, but it’s taking forever.

You could probably do this with the normal find replace option on the edit menu.

If you do I recommend prompting each replace

If that does not work reliably, or you need unconfirmed bulk conversions, or perhaps rather more complex changes, then try the Search and Replace Plugin from the Plugin Store.

That lets you restrict the Search Scope to just Source Records (SOUR) and also on the Extra Filters tab right down to Source Title (SOUR.TITL) or Source Short (SOUR.ABBR), so there is less risk of making mistaken changes when unconfirmed bulk changes are enabled.

Furthermore, the LUA Pattern Mode allows more complex rearrangements of the Source Titles if needed.

BTW: If you wish to retain standard Source Title formats in future, then consider using the free companion program Ancestral Sources.

Thank you both for your replies. I tried Jane's version first, and it worked a treat (I was aware of the search and replace facility, but thought it only dealt with text fields, such as addresses etc.). It did exactly what I was after, to change all occurrences of "Birth Certificate" to just "Birth" (as per Jane's screenshot). After agreeing on about 10 changes I decided to go for broke and change all. However, in my haste to see results, I had made a typo and messed everything up! No worries though, the procedure gave me a listing of all 200 changes, and gave me the option to 'undo' the replace (CTRL Z), which I gratefully did, and all is well -a cup of coffee later I decided to try again, with success. Thank you again for the excellent advice, and of course, for an excellent bit of software!

Robert

The Search and Replace Plugin does focus on text fields, but despite what you might think Source Title and many other fields are fundamentally just text fields. The Plugin also handles Age and Date fields, which are also just special forms of text field. It will also handle renaming Media File links and the associate file itself.

Mike,

I have now tried your search and replace plugin, and it also works a treat - I particularly like the idea of pre-selecting records for searching, and the extra filter for source title is brilliant!

I'll take a look at Ancestral Sources app for GRO Certificate entries, as I already use it successfully for Census entries.

Thanks again,

Robert