Is there a quicker way to edit out middle names from "Proper first name" field?

Question

Much (most) of my Wikitree profile data came from a large Gedcom transfer, that came from my tree on Ancestry.com

Unfortunately, after the import, the "Proper first name" field on WikiTree profiles contained both first and second name.  It's a lot of tedious work to fix this for each profile, moving the 2nd name to the correct field.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Mitch

Answer 1

Hi Mitch,

Sorry, there is not. It has to be done one name at a time.

As you probably know, the reason your import wouldn't have created profiles with separate name fields is because the gedcom from Ancestry doesn't have separate name fields. When we first created our import software, we had it automatically try to "guess" at middle names in these cases. But that would only be about 90-95% correct (e.g. is "Mary Beth" the first name or first and middle?) and people complained.

Maybe we should switch back to guessing automatically and let people fix the mistakes? In your case, it won't help of course. This would only be for new imports.

Chris