Adding new rows to attribute table/changing polygon's attribute

Question

I'm using a shapefile of district boundaries. There are multiple districts which have the same name but belong to different provinces. In a few of these cases, the attribute table incorrectly specifies these polygons as belonging to the same district/province.

Example: Suppose we have a district with the name "A" which appears in provinces 1,2, and 3. The attribute table should have a separate row for each of these "A" districts but instead attributes all 3 polygons to province 1.

Is there any way to correct this?

I am using ArcMap 10.8.2.

Answer 1

From my understanding of your question, you need to use the Multipart To Singlepart tool from the Data Management toolbox.

Then, you can use the newly created polygon layer to update the information in the attribute table and put each polygon to the correct district/province.

Answer 2

The other answer is good (and what I'd do). However, if you don't want to create a new layer, but would prefer to alter the existing one, you can edit it and explode just the polygons of interest from multi to single part

In the Modify Features pane, Explode Explode separates the component parts of a multipart feature into single-part features with attribute values that match the original multipart feature. You can separate all component parts at one time or separate individual parts by clicking them.

Explode features

Exploding a multipart feature separates all of its component parts into single-part features. Feature attributes from the multipart feature are copied to the new features. You can choose to keep or discard the original multipart feature.

1. On the Edit tab, in the Features group, click Modify Features. The Modify Features pane appears.

2. Expand Divide and click Explode. The tool opens in the pane.

3. Click the Features tab.

4. Click Active Select and select the multipart feature you want to explode. The selection appears as a list in the pane.

5. To preserve the original feature and copy the parts, check Keep original features.

6. In the pane, click Explode.