Find and Replace

When to Use Find and Replace

Who To Look For

Where to Look

How to Look

Case Sensitivity

Find and Replace in Sources

Find and Replace in Places

When to Use Find and Replace

Note: We strongly recommend choosing File > Save A Backup Copy before using this feature. Changes made with find-and-replace cannot be undone!

If you discover that you have entered a name, place, or some other text incorrectly throughout your family file, Reunion can automatically find and replace (aka "search and replace") all occurrences of a text string.

To use the Find and Replace feature, click Find in the navbar and select Find and Replace.

This opens the Find and Replace window, shown and explained below.

 Who / Type

In the Replace window, the first pair of buttons (Who) lets you choose whether to apply the find-and-replace to fields for all people or only marked people.

This section changes to Type when source fields are chosen in the Where button, described below.

 Where to Look

Click the Where button to focus a search to a particular type of field.

Note: Choosing All Fields affects all person and family fields in your family file except...

 How to Look

The "how" buttons let you specify exactly how to look for text. There are three types of searches which are described below.

1. Any Match

Any Match matches when any combination of characters matches, even if the characters are embedded in a word. For example:

Find "arm" and replace with "hand"
arm changes to hand
broken arm changes to broken hand
Farmer changes to Fhander
2. Whole Words

Whole Words considers the search string to be a complete word and will only match when the search string matches a complete word in a field. It doesn't consider parts of words. For example:

Find "arm" and replace with "hand"
arm changes to hand
broken arm changes to broken hand
Farmer does not change

Find "Farmer" and replace with "Truck Driver"
Farmer changes to Truck Driver
Chicken Farmer changes to Chicken Truck Driver

3. Whole Fields

Whole Fields considers the search string to be a complete field. A match happens only when the entire contents of a field match the entire search string exactly. For example:

Find "arm" and replace with "hand"
arm changes to hand
broken arm does not change
Farmer does not change

Find "Farmer" and replace with "Truck Driver"
Farmer changes to Truck Driver
Chicken Farmer does not change

Case Sensitivity
Use the Case sensitive button when a find and replace operation should attend to character case. A situation where this would be crucial would be the global replacing of a state's abbreviation, such as "IN" with "Indiana." For example, checking the Case sensitive button prior to this search would avoid replacing the preposition "in" in sentences.

Find and Replace in Sources

To perform find and replace in source records...

  1. Select Find in the navbar.
  2. Click the Find and Replace button.
  3. Select one of these three items using the Where button...

When you do this, the Who buttons of this window changes to a Type button, which you can click and select the type of source record you want to be affected by the find and replace. Or, you can click the Type button and choose Any Type to affect all source records. Source types are explained here.

Find and Replace in Places

Reunion maintains a database of place records, which can be viewed from the Places sidebar. Each place record contains the place name, geocodes, and comments and is connected to one or more event fields.

When you rename an event place in the Edit Person panel, that event will point to a new or different record in the places database. If the old place name has no more instances in your family file, then that place name record will be deleted along with the geocodes and comments. If the new event place name is already present in your family file then the geotags and comments for that new place record will apply to that place. When a new place name record is created, the geotag and comments fields are blank.

When you rename places from the sidebar, you're modifying existing place name records which will not remove geocodes and comments because place name records are not being deleted or added.

Find and Replace behaves like editing place names from the Edit Person panel and not like editing place names in the Places sidebar - therefore, if Find and Replace results in a place name that is new to your family file, the geocodes field will be blank. However, if Find and Replace results in a place name that's already present in your family file and contains geocodes, then geocodes will be retained.