redracer

Unfortunately, so far nobody has come up with a practicable solution that is any shorter than what I already realised was the basic answer. TMG Utilities does not allow one to merge sources as far as I can see, and the other solution offered is basically exactly what I had already envisaged, except it adds a further step of adding the number into the name of each discrete source reference called "Unnamed Source". There are over 200, 000 sources in my Master source list called Unnamed Source. The vast majority are only used for one citation. Those citations turn out to be meaningless. I know that this means that somewhere along the line I lost over 200, 000 citations and accompanying data. That is, however, a separate problem. What I am trying to do, without spending several tedious months doing it, is to eliminate all these worthless sources and 'purify' or 'purge' my system of the useless elements created by this error. Is it possible to export my data to a gedcom file or something else and somewhere along in that process get to choose the several hundred bona fide sources that remain in my database and simply drop the unwanted "Unnamed Source" sources by, say, failing to select them for export? Is that a possible workaround solution? Many thanks for everyone's input so far. I don't mean to sound ungrateful for people's having taken the time to answer my query. Redracer:)

Hello, Last year about this time I imported all my data from a full Family TreeMaker database (I could no longer enter any new material) into TMG 6 via the GenBridge method. I had inherited a number of errors from older versions of FTM and before that from PAF in both programs' various incarnations. GenBridge allowed me to edit things nicely without the dataset (project) crashing. So I was very happy, plus I could add new people. One problem I noticed after I had already done considerable work in my new TMG project was that I had lost a lot of source information because it had been corrupted in former programs. I had thousands of sources with no name. I managed to rename them all "Unnamed Source" which I thought logical at the time. Unfortunately, rather than creating one source with that name for over 200,000 missing source citations, I got some 200,000 distinct sources all bearing different numbers but having the same name. I quickly discovered that I had made an error in 'solving' my problem this way, but was unable to undo it. Then I tried deleting a few manually and discovered that this took a considerable amount of time. Moreover, the source numbers for these 'dummy' (in more ways than one I realise!) sources called Unnamed Source, were interspersed with bona fide sources I wanted to keep. Is there any way I can solve this problem efficiently, or am I stuck with having to delete all 200 thousand or so unsatisfactory, identical sources manually? Many thanks, Redracer

I wonder if there is a way to edit the title field for a person globally? I am trying to undo something that is in many thousands of individuals' title fields, and the manual approach is taking way too long. In another program (PAF), I started out entering Mr or Mrs plus the surname or sometimes the title in other languages (mainly German). Now I would like to delete all these instances. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Redracer