I would be very wary of doing that for a couple of reasons. 1) Surnames change. Especially further back in time, due to lack of consistency in spelling and illiteracy of the majority of the population. I have people with surnames such as Lee where it is spelled at least 4 different ways for one person. 2) Not everybody who has the "wrong" surname may be in the family you really want to change. I have an unusual name in my ancestry (Gluyas) and one of my wife's ancestors married one - unrelated back as far as 1700. Regards Steve On 19/02/2015 13:24, W3BNR via wrote: > I recently learned of a misspelling of a family surname. There are a number of > people that require the change. > Is there a way to mass change the name at one time, or do I have to do each one > individually? > > I know place names can be changed this way, but what about surnames? >

I have a few surnames that are spelled differently - often the change was made by one child while the rest kept the original. There are those that I don't know why the spelling difference is there but I suspect they are related. Originally, when I would want to find one it would be under one of the variations. So, I choose the most common of the surame spellings and for the others I added that most common name to EditScreen/Names/Sort. This way all of them show up in one list when using Find/F3. Example: Name in Name Field LastName used in EditScreen/Names/Sort John Smith Smith John Smyth Smith John Smithe Smith Can all be found using Find/F3 "smith" Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve via Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2015 10:54 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [BK] Multi-change of surnames I would be very wary of doing that for a couple of reasons. 1) Surnames change. Especially further back in time, due to lack of consistency in spelling and illiteracy of the majority of the population. I have people with surnames such as Lee where it is spelled at least 4 different ways for one person. 2) Not everybody who has the "wrong" surname may be in the family you really want to change. I have an unusual name in my ancestry (Gluyas) and one of my wife's ancestors married one - unrelated back as far as 1700. Regards Steve On 19/02/2015 13:24, W3BNR via wrote: > I recently learned of a misspelling of a family surname. There are a number of > people that require the change. > Is there a way to mass change the name at one time, or do I have to do each one > individually? > > I know place names can be changed this way, but what about surnames? > Remember - Use the Archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/search ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Yes, Steve, you must be careful in the change of surnames. In this particular case the families with the problem are from the 1700s aand 1800s before decendants came to America. There are only a couple of families involved but there were many children and I hate to do them one at a time, more chance of error. Their decendents who I do not have, nor am I interested in had changed the name to "Nemeth" which was given to me by the person that furnished the data on the family. Unfortunately in his data base, the families that I was interested in originated in Hungary and the original spelling was "Német" according to church records that I checked. I corrected my data base and made him aware of the original spelling. He will be changing his data also. Ed http://JonesFarm.us/ The trick is to get education out of politics - and get it into the politicians. On 2/19/2015 11:54 AM, Steve via wrote: > I would be very wary of doing that for a couple of reasons. > > 1) Surnames change. Especially further back in time, due to lack of consistency in spelling and illiteracy of the majority of the population. I have people with surnames such as Lee where it is spelled at least 4 different ways for one person. > > 2) Not everybody who has the "wrong" surname may be in the family you really want to change. I have an unusual name in my ancestry (Gluyas) and one of my wife's ancestors married one - unrelated back as far as 1700. > > Regards > Steve > > On 19/02/2015 13:24, W3BNR via wrote: >> I recently learned of a misspelling of a family surname. There are a number of >> people that require the change. >> Is there a way to mass change the name at one time, or do I have to do each one >> individually? >> >> I know place names can be changed this way, but what about surnames? >> > > Remember - Use the Archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/search > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >