Surname also a country name

[bastilledayman]

My great-great grandmother's surname is the same as a country. When I try to search for relatives with that surname, it finds others who came from that country. Is there a way to get around this?

[prairielad]

I suggest downloading your Family Finder matchlist

You can download the csv or excel file at the bottom of your match page.

.csv is the easiest to open

Country names in file are usually listed in (), Highlight ancestral names column, CTRL + H, In Find what enter the name/country in brackets ie (Ireland), In Replace with enter country abbreviation ie (IRL)

Click on find tab and search name in question.

This will not get rid of all the country names if other characters are listed inside the brackets ie(Mayo,Ireland), but it should eliminate many.

Edit
how to open Excel file download

https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Import-XML-data-6eca3906-d6c9-4f0d-b911-c736da817fa4#bmimport_an_xml_file_as_external_data_w{

[dna]

An addon to prairielad's advice

And if you do not have Excel, there free software alternatives available.

Merry Christmas - Mr W

[David Guetta]

Depending on what the surname/country is, there may be a surname project for it. For instance there is a fairly large Ireland surname project that specifically excludes people who just mean they have ancestry from Ireland and not the surname in their lineage: https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/ireland/about

[Lassie]

Alternative software to excel

Open Office has free software that is very similar to MS Office. It has been around for some time. I have used it before works very similar. Anyone else tried it for FTree DNA?

[dna]

Open Office has free software that is very similar to MS Office. It has been around for some time. I have used it before works very similar. Anyone else tried it for FTree DNA?

LibreOffice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice offer very similar functionality to modern versions of Microsoft Office. And both are available for free for Linux, OS X and Windows.

However, they are not direct replacements! For example, current versions of LibreOffice Calc can run simple Excel macros (Visual Basic for Applications), but not any arbitrary Excel macro.

As long as one does not depend on exchanging spreadsheets with embedded macros, one should be fine. The products have been in development for many years and at some point in time enjoyed focus and funding from Oracle and IBM.

Mr W