Places — Check After Deleting People

Deleting a Person Does NOT Cleanup Associated Place

A good software program should never delete a “field” (text) in a database if the field is in use.
In other words, if you delete Mary Smith from your database and the place associated with her is Hillbilly Holler, NotAReal County, Alabama, USA **AND** only ONE other person is also associated with Hillybilly Holler — that entry in Places (or Locations) should be untouched by the deletion.
But what if Mary Smith is the ONLY one???

You’d think the deletion would ALSO cleanup the places (locations) entry as well.

Family Tree Maker does NOT touch the places (locations). 

I honestly do not know what Legacy & RootsMagic do. I discovered this about FTM last night much to my surprise.
Earlier this year I had done a MAJOR purge of people (see Time to Chop Off the Protruding Parts [Part 1], also see Part 2). I never thought about deleting unassociated places or frankly, that there would be SO many. [Note: Time to Chop Off… will return to this site. 4/13/2019] Family Tree Maker displays the name(s) of people who are linked to the place (location).  So it is easy to identify the places that have no one linked to them.
Easy but requires checking each individually. I know of no other way but to check other than one at a time.

• Click on Places in FTM.
• Start with the first entry.
• Look to the right & see if there is any person associated with the place.
• If none, delete.
• If one or more, move to the next entry.
• Repeat. Over & over & over until done.

Should I have noticed this sooner? 
Probably — after all, I wrote about merging places. But I didn’t.  But now that you’ve read this post AND if you have done “people deletions” you know what you have to go do. I ***STRONGLY SUGGEST*** it.  It’s just part of doing a database cleanup. And then keeping it clean.
BTW — I suspect the same issue with sources. Why would deleting a person also clean up any “source” only linked to that one person, but not handle places? Hmmmmmmmmm……..
Comments?

• If you know how Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic or Legacy handles the above, please leave a comment & let the rest of us know.
• Other comments or ideas welcome.

Updated March 28, 2019, 6:48 pm