GEDCOM import leaves multiple duplicate sources

[cdenbow 0]

I have a problem that I can't find a solution to on your web site or in your book. This morning I import a GEDCOM file that has details I didn't have on one branch of my family. The import went well and I then merged the imported dataset into my main dataset. I then, of course, had to merge several individuals who were duplicated. All of that is now accomplished; however, I've got one remaining issue. For some reason each citation of his sources was imported as a separate instance of the source rather than a citation to the same source. In other words, he had about ten or so sources that were cited multiple times, but each citation of a specific source resulted in the generation of a new source rather than referencing the original source. As a result I have several hundred sources that need to be merged. I know how to do this one-by-one, but I wondered if there was a way to do a bulk merge. I've looked at John's TMG Utility and didn't see a way to accomplish this via that route. Any ideas would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

 

Carl

[John Cardinal 0]

Carl,

 

The Change CItation Parts feature in TMG Utility may be able to help. You can use it to merge sources by changing the Source Number associated with a source. if you can write a filter that reliably chooses all citations that should be for Source "X", but are currently assigned to some other source, then you change the Source Number to "X".

[Michael Hannah 0]

It is not clear if you need to merge sources or source types, or just redirect the citations to a desired source. John's suggestion may be of help to change all the citations to a single preferred source, but I think? it will leave all those other sources in your Master Source List, now with no citations to them. You might want to review the issues about merging Sources and Source types after an import as described in the "Import/Export" chapter of my on-line book.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[cdenbow 0]

Thanks, guys. I must admit all this still leaves me pretty confused. It's late and I'm going to bed. I'll try to tackle this tomorrow.

[cdenbow 0]

John,

 

Thanks so much -- your suggestion worked wonderfully and I've now combined a number of duplicate sources. I do have one remaining problem in that in combining the duplicate sources it only combined sources that actually had citations so I'm left with a number of sources without citations that I'd like to simply delete. For example a source with the strange name of James Harvey Barton.FTW (my cousin's method of citing information he got from another cousin) was listed about 600 times. Using TMGU I was able to combine about 520 of these. About 80 did not have any citations and were just left as residual garbage, pardon the expression. Is there an easy way just to mass delete sources with no citations?

 

FYI: This particular GEDCOM import contains very interesting links, which I have independent sources for, which I will be adding in good time, taking my SHARP line back to Ireland.

 

Thanks again for all of your help. You've saved me a lot of time!

 

Carl

Edited May 11, 2016 by cdenbow

[John Cardinal 0]

Carl,

 

I am not aware of a way to mass delete sources that have no citations. There might be a tricky way to do it where you copy everyone in the project to a new project using the "List of People" secondary output capability. When TMG builds a new project like that, I think it only copies the sources that are actually used.

 

In the Master Source List, you can delete a single source pretty quickly, so the other choice is to bite the bullet and click 1,200 times (once to request deletion, once to confirm it, for 600 sources) to get rid of them.

[cdenbow 0]

Well, John, it's only about 120 or so that I have delete -- not 600. There were originally 600 of one duplicated source that were combined into one, except 80 were left out because of no citation, in the one case. I have some other residuals from other combined sources that probably bring that 80 up to 120 to 150. So, I guess I'll just do it manually! Ugh! -- Carl

[cdenbow 0]

Well, I bit the bullet and finished the job manually in TMG. You were correct, John it was more like 600 sources sans citations that I had to delete. I had thought that it was only ones that weren't merged because they had zero citations that I had to worry about. I didn't understand the algorithm -- each merger in TMGU simply transferred the citations from X to Y, but left Y in place with zero citations. At any rate, it's all done now.

 

I do have two more questions:

 

1. Would it be a good idea to renumber the sources, since I now have several big gaps in the numbering?

2. Why would I be getting thousands of problems corrected with the Validate File Integrity utility each time I make a large number of source deletions and mergers?

 

In terms of the second question, I always run the VFI a second time after it makes a large number of corrections like this, and in these cases it always returns zero problems on the second run.

[Jim Byram 0]

The visible source numbers are a user convenience and gaps in the numbers have no impact on the database operations. You can renumber the sources or pack the sources to eliminate the gaps as you wish.

 

VFI has to do with database housekeeping. I might be able to detect some of what is being cleaned up if I had a copy of the project before VFI was run but it's not something to be concerned with.

 

Years ago, it might have taken more than one VFI run to get everything cleaned up. However, over a long period, VFI was really tightened up and I haven't seen the need for more than one run in a very long time.

[cdenbow 0]

Thanks, Jim. You've answered all of my questions. I think I will renumber the sources just to satisfy my sense of orderliness. ;-) -- Carl