Citation Names - GEDCOM and Treeshare

This is a ‘new’ field in RM8 that had no direct equivalent in RM7, and if intelligently used is quite useful in organing citations and in drilling down from things like Media that may be linked to Citations rather than directly to People.

However I am always wary of new/unique features in case I want or need to share my work with others and/or transfer or upload to other platforms.

  1. How is this field treated for GEDCOM and other data transfers?
  2. Is it picked up by Treeshare and synced with the corresponding Citation entry in Ancestry? (I suspect it isn’t).

I doubt it would be transferred via GEDCOM, not even exported as a custom tag, and that includes drag’n’drop between RM databases. Why? There is no data construct in GEDCOM for reusable citations which is why the Citation Name was created. On export RM8 reverts reusable citations to single-use copies to conform with GEDCOM.

Same applies to TreeShare.

I think you are right about the conclusions, but not sure about the reasons. I created a small test GEDCOM file for just one person and imported it into Family Tree Maker (FTM) of which I have a working version. Not sure exactly what you mean by ‘reusable citations’ as FTM has something very similar.

Anyway:
‘Citation Name’ in RM8 - goes nowhere
‘Citation Detail’ in RM8 - maps on to ‘Citation Detail’ in FTM
(the one curiously labelled as ‘Page Number’ if you use the Free Form Source template in RM8)
‘Research Note’ in RM8 - maps on to ‘Citation Text’ in FTM
Detail Comment’ in RM8 - maps on to ‘Reference Note’ in FTM

Moral I suppose is if you are putting anything important in the Citation Name field, make sure you repeat it in one of the other fields too.

In RM8, when you copy (memorize in RM7) a citation, you can paste it elsewhere with the choices 'paste copy ’ (creates a duplicate but independent citation as in RM7) or ‘reuse’ which links or tags the citation to some fact without creating a duplicate record of its data. A citation with 1 “use” is equivalent to a citation in RM7; with more than 1 use, it has been reused. All RM8 citations are reusable.