Deletion of identical tags

[Tony Laverick 0]

I am a very new user of TMG v6.07.000 and by my own enthusiasm over knowledge I have left myself with quite a problem.

 

I, in retrospect, stupidly imported both a FTM v6 file and a GEDCOM file into TMG. This has resulted in numerous duplications of people and various tags. Where identical people were identifiable by having different ID#s, I have managed to merge them. What I now have left is a picklist of people, many of whom are duplicated, and can only be differentiated by the fact that one of the names is marked as primary. Strangely, the names in most cases are identical but there are variations in the case used (i.e. a mixture of upper and lower case names). I have contacted the Wholly Genes Technical Support site and have been guided towards John Cardinal's TMG Utility software. This does show promise in the fact that it will delete all non-primary tags but is potentially very dangerous.

 

What I want to know is, is it possible to run a report with a filter that will compare the various Name-var tags within the same record and then, using secondary output, write those records where the Name-var tags are ACTUALLY DIFFERENT rather than just written in upper-case rather than lower-case, for example, to a new Data Set? One could then run the TMG Utility and delete all non-primary Name-var tags then merge the original DataSet with the newly created Data Set to restore the records with genuine Name-var variants.

 

This technique could then be used to delete other identical tags which are differentiated only by the primary designation. This may seem very desperate and long winded but, if it can't be done, I am faced with deleting manually a very large number of tags.

 

I have attached screen shots showing the problems I have been describing.

 

Your advice will be gratefully received.

 

Tony

 

Name___ID__duplicates.doc

Duplicate_tags.doc

[Terry Reigel 0]

I, in retrospect, stupidly imported both a FTM v6 file and a GEDCOM file into TMG.  This has resulted in numerous duplications of people and various tags.  Where identical people were identifiable by having different ID#s, I have managed to merge them.  What I now have left is a picklist of people, many of whom are duplicated, and can only be differentiated by the fact that one of the names is marked as primary. 

To be more precise, you have a list of names - the Picklist is a list of name, not of people. If you have more than one name with the same ID#, that means that you have a person with more than one name.

Strangely, the names in most cases are identical but there are variations in the case used (i.e. a mixture of upper and lower case names).  I have contacted the Wholly Genes Technical Support site and have been guided towards John Cardinal's TMG Utility software.  This does show promise in the fact that it will delete all non-primary tags but is potentially very dangerous.

I agree that's very dangerous - you would loose nicknames, alternate spellings, etc. if they exist in the data.

What I want to know is, is it possible to run a report with a filter that will compare the various Name-var tags within the same record and then, using secondary output, write those records where the Name-var tags are ACTUALLY DIFFERENT rather than just written in upper-case rather than lower-case, for example, to a new Data Set?

Sorry, no. There are no filter terms that compare the contents of fields as you would need to do this.

 

I assume that you have already done too much editing or made too many additions to just delete the project and re-import? That would be the obvious solution.

 

Do you know whether the two sets of data contain identical information, such and dates, places, and sources, about each person? Only if it does could you consider deleting the non-primary tags on a wholesale basis.

 

You might be able to get some idea whether there are more than one different name for people by creating a List of names report, and sorting it my ID# - that way all the tags for each person would sort together, and you could examine the list to see if you find different names for the same person.

 

You could limit the report to people with multiple names by using the secondary output of the List of People report to set a temporary flag for everyone with more than on name group tag.