I’d like an additional function in the Merge duplicates tool. I’m trying to merge two databases, one of which has a lot more content in facts than the other. I can accept that manual editing may be inevitable with say births and deaths. But I’m thinking particularly of marriage and residence. After merging duplicate into primary, I can finish up with a screen full of duplicates of those facts.
I could mention two categories of these:
those that sure do look 100% identical to me, and
those with identical names, dates and places, but with one that lacks other content such as Description or Note.
With ‘1’ - ? I don’t know, maybe there’s an extra space here or a comma there; and maybe there’s no automation possible? But with ‘2’, it surely couldn’t be hard to program in a user setting to delete dupes of fact ‘X’ with field ‘Y’ empty. Or something such. It would save me a heap of time right now; that’s for sure.
NB1: Being noobish with not much geekery, I really need this in the app interface, not in SQLite scripting or whatever.
NB2: Or am I missing something not too geeky after all?
Before using merge make sure your place list is cleaned up. That will cause a lot of duplicate facts if the facts are using separate places in the place list. If the facts are different in any way it will save both facts.
After cleaning up your places, look down your FACT list to see IF you MIGHT have duplicate facts-- mine happened because I had used several other genealogy programs over the years and when I finally moved my info into RM, for some reason , it didn’t like their birth, death and burial fact–so ended up with 2 of each.
Go to the 3 dots top of page on right and click on FACT TYPE LIST and just scroll down the list— IF there are duplicates such as 2 Birth facts name the 2nd one BIRTH 2 then go to TOOLS on left side ( if you are in RM 9) and under FACT TOOLS select Change Fact type for everyone.
MAKE SURE YOU BACK-UP YOUR FILE BEFORE DOING THIS!!!
Hopefully this will eliminate some of the excess…
Then go to settings left hand bottom and under the gear turn on RIN under NUMBER TO DISPLAY-- on marriages, you can go to the COUPLE LIST ( 4th one over in same row as pedigree, family list etc)-- hit marriage date to sort by dates and you can see if any of your duplicate marriages are because of different RIN # for either or both people–in my case Geo Doppler is the same BUT wife Terry has 2 different RIN #s
So I would go to the family page of Terry Moore I wanted to save and
manually merge the 2 together…
This will get rid of the 2nd marriage BUT only IF the marriage info is EXACTLY the SAME in both entries…
Once you have finished with the marriage date, I would then sort the list by father and check for duplicates and then by mother–again that should clean some of them up BUT you are probably going to still have some that need to be manually looked at and fixed BECAUSE they are NOT 100% EXACT-
As in Geo and Terry above-- I merged Terry BUT still have 2 marriages showing–so I would go in , look at both as one MIGHT have more info then the other and delete one of them…
After that you MIGHT still have some duplicate marriages due to a problem that Patrick R brought up about a week ago which we will call PHANTOM MARRIAGES-- basically may have something to do with merging ( not sure abt this) BUT the marriage list show 2 marriages for the couple
when I look at the info, there is only one husband and wife and 1 marriage FACT LISTED–only way to get rid of the phantom record is to UNLINK EVERYONE-- kids and spouse then link them all back together…
As for Residence or any fact ( marriage as well BUT I think the couple list is better), you can go to PUBLISH-- left side-- click on Fact List-- put residence as fact type and generate a report-- save the report-- then you will have to manual go in and fix any duplicates…
Might take a little time BUT hopefully it will clear up almost all if NOT all-- and next time maybe try Compare databases BEFORE adding the new info/ people and maybe use that to clean up the info before adding–just make sure you keep the common link for a new individual, so you know how they fit into your lines…
