Spellcheck Your Family History Notes
If your record management program does not include a spell checker for an individual’s notes, try this. It’s fast, easy, and it works! Open a new, empty Word document and minimize it. Now open an individual’s Notes page and copy it to your clipboard. (Yes, copy–don’t cut yet!) Open the Word document and paste the copied notes there. Draw a short line at the lower end. Select the spell check feature and work through the set of notes. When finished, copy the corrected set of notes and paste at the top of the individual’s Notes page. When you are satisfied that all is well, highlight and delete the old set of notes below the line you added and then delete the corrected set on the Word document. Voila! Correctly spelled notes!

I use PAF and printed a list of all the names of individuals whose record contained notes (File > Print Reports > Lists > Individuals with Notes > Print.) I then worked through the list using the above idea.

Della Nielson Steineckert

AWJ Editor’s Note: Family Tree Maker 2008 and 2009 have a spell checker for the Notes section. Just open up the note for a particular ancestor and click on the spell check icon. Be sure to check the entire note though. If you close the check window before the program has checked the entire note, your changes will not be saved.

More About the Mc
As several recent tips have mentioned, it pays to be really creative when looking for Irish names. Think of variations. I’ve found the same person using macneal/mcneal/neal/m’neal/mneal. Sometimes that apostrophe really needs to be there and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the search engine. MacKneal just might be found under M’Kneal/M’Neal or Mkneal/Mneal. Don’t forget to do a Soundex search with and without the apostrophe.

Kathy Farrell
Payson, Arizona

Summer Homes
In response to Juliana’s city directory article, indeed your missing people may have had summer homes. After years of trying to find a death certificate for an 1894 death, I was amazed this summer to find her obituary that said she, a New York City resident, died at her summer home in Bath Beach, Rhode Island! And the obituary was in a Chicago newspaper–go figure. Her husband did business in Chicago among other places.

And a big thank you goes to Ancestry, though it was not on their website. This past summer I attended the IAJGS conference in Chicago and Ancestry provided the computers and had the obituary website on them.

Barbara Kaufman
Mt. Vernon, New York.

If you have a suggestion you would like to share with other researchers, send it to: mailto:[email protected] . Thanks to all of this week’s contributors!

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