In RM10 I’ve used “Merge all duplicate citations.” For a particular source in RM10, I have 112 citations which differ only in their Reference Notes. In RM7, when I create a Narrative Report, there is only one endnote, since I don’t include to print the Reference Notes. In RM10, even if I choose “Reuse Endnote numbers” in creating the report (and again don’t include Reference Notes), there are 112 endnotes - all the same (actually 1 full footnote and 111 short footnotes) - even though the resulting endnote sentence is the same. Is this truly how RM10 works? That would be a show stopper for me. Thanks, Jeff
That truly is how it works in RM10. The problem is that your Reference Notes are different, even though you are not printing them. It is your Reference Notes that are preventing the “Reuse Endnote numbers” option from working in your reports.
RM10 makes its decision about reusing endnote numbers based on the citations being the same physical citation in an internal table called the CitationTable. Citations become the same physical citation in the CitationTable based either on the use of the Merge All Duplicate Citations tool or based on the use of the Paste with Reuse option when citations are memorized and pasted.
- The Merge All Duplicate Citations tool takes into account the footnote/endnote text, which in your case are the same for all 112 footnotes.
- The Merge All Duplicate Citations tool takes into account the Reference Notes (viz., Research Note and Detail Comment). Your Reference Notes are different. That is why they will not merge. And because your Reference Notes are different, it seems to me that a merge would be disastrous even if you could force it to happen. And actually, you can force such merges, but it’s one citation at a time rather than 112 all in one go.
- I am not certain if the Merge All Duplicate Citations tool takes into account the Detail Ref# field. I suspect that most users do not take advantage of this feature, so it’s probably not much of an issue.
- The Merge All Duplicate Citations tool does not take into account the Media field. This can have disastrous results for users who have citations that differ only in their media files. Such citations are merged anyway, even though they are really different citations. This problem comes into play sometimes for users who are heavy users of ancestry.com and who use RM’s TreeShare feature to sync between ancestry.com and RM. This is because there are collections on ancestry.com which are only partially indexed and where the citations generated by ancestry.com for different media files in the same collection can be identical. I don’t know how to solve this problem. It’s like RM needs to concatenate the media file name with the rest of the citation for these kinds of citations, but that would be a really ugly solution. Or ancestry.com could clean up their act, but that seems unlikely. Indeed, users who work only inside of ancestry.com itself should not see this problem.
- The Merge All Duplicate Citations tool does not take into account the Citation WebTags field. I do not use Citation WebTags, but I suspect that merging citations that differ only in their WebTags would have very negative consequences.
I really don’t know how to advise you. RM7 didn’t have your problem because it implemented “Reuse Endnote numbers” based on the actual text of the footnotes/endnotes. I don’t know how RM7 handled “Reuse Endnote numbers” when there were otherwise duplicate citations which had different Research Notes.
Your particular use case would be solved if RM10 would implement “Reuse Endnote numbers” based on the actual text of the actual text of the footnotes/endnotes rather than being based on the physical database structure of sources and citations. I have no idea if there is any inclination on the part of the RM developers to make this change.
The problem with citations from ancesty.com via TreeShare that are really different but which differ only in the name of the media file or in the WebTag field is an even tougher problem. For this problem, I don’t think it worked “correctly” in RM7 with the “Reuse Endnote numbers” option in reports, either. And in fact, I have a hard time imagining how it could work “correctly” in either RM7 or RM10. If the citations are actually different at a very deep level even though the footnote/endnote text is the same, then I think there needs to be some actual difference in the footnote/endnote text somehow or other such as my really ugly suggestion of concatenating the media file name to the citation text.
By the way, I’m a source splitter. I don’t have your problem with otherwise duplicate citations having different Research Notes. But because of being a source splitter, I have the same sort of problem as yours if I wish to create a Bibliography. In both RM7 and RM10, the creation of a Bibliography is based on the physical database structure rather than being based on the text of the Bibliography entries as it should be. So I can’t produce a Bibliography in either RM7 or RM10. This particular problem would disappear for me if I quit being a source splitter, but I think other problems would arise in their stead such as the inability to export my citations to other genealogy software without the citations becoming mangled in the process. So I’m sticking with source splitting for now.
Jerry, thanks for the detailed explanation and confirmation. As a lumper, in RM7 “Reuse endnote numbers where possible” worked great - I got a single footnote for multiple citations even if they differed in the Reference Note. And, I got a clean, non-repeating Bibliography. I am very diligent about, and find great value in my endnotes, following Evidence Explained closely. Which is why RM is great with flexible source templates. I have been a user since RM3 and purchased RM8/9/10 but hadn’t yet converted from RM7. Reusable citations and (finally) Copy Fact are my draw to the new version. I wonder from RM’s standpoint if this issue was an unintended consequence and/or something they would consider addressing. But since we’re into the third new version (8/9/10) I guess there’s not enough user concern/interest. (As you point out, not an issue for splitters.) I’ll have to look at my citations that give me this problem and see if I want to make all the Reference Notes the same. In the example, the source is a 4 page list of maybe 200 BMD records. I currently add only one person’s BMD data transcription to the Reference Note for his/her use of the citation. Otherwise I suppose I could add all to get the common citation. Having just one person’s BMD data in their citation makes it easy when I click down through their various citations for a fact to compare data from different sources (e.g. difference sources give different birth dates) and to come to a conclusion.
It’s hard to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. But I suspect that if I were in your situation, for these particular source/citation combinations I would just leave the Research Note and the Detail Comment blank. Doing it that way, my citations would merge for this source/citation combination and “Reuse Endnote numbers” would work just fine for this source/citation combination. I could still see my source data in the source but not in the citation. RM8/9/10 makes the source data a little harder to look at than the citation data which unfortunate, but I just put up with that problem in order to solve other problems.
Analogies by definition are inexact, but here are a couple of analogies to think about. Despite the fact that compiled families histories can be unreliable evidence, suppose you are using page 23 of a book entitled “History of the Doe Family” for a bunch of different people. Would you make a different citation for John Doe on page 23 and for Samuel Doe on page 23 and for Sally Doe on page 23 and so forth for a dozen different Doe family members on page 23. Or would your citation just be for page 23 as a whole so that all page 23 citations would be merged in reports? I would make “History of the Doe Family” the source and page 23 be the citation for everybody on the page. Doing it the way I do it, I can make it work fine as a splitter or as a lumper. And of course I might also have a citation for page 97 and for page 113 if I need to do so. So I’m sort of equating a book with a portion of your collection, but perhaps not with your entire collection.
Similarly, how do you cite census pages? Many users cite down to the family, so for example if the Doe family and the Smith family were both on Enumeration District 19-3, page 12a, then there would be two different citations for the same page, one citation for each family. And indeed, that’s the way most or maybe all of RM’s built-in source templates for census work. But there are other viable models. By analogy to the printed Doe book, I cite census down to the page so that I would use the same citation for both the Doe family and the Smith family on the same census page.
So I think you have some viable options to combine citations together for some of your source collections with some minor tweaks to your system rather than requiring a total change of your system.
Jerry, thanks for some good ideas to get me back on track. Looking at your examples, I wouldn’t want to have 10 different citations for the 10 people on page 23 of the family history book. I just wanted one citation to that page, but each individual person’s data from that page put into the Reference Note in their citation. Another example would be a Bible where I really just want to cite the Bible but with different reference notes. My census citations are to the individual family. Anyways, I’ll look at putting data into the source text or just having common Reference Notes for those sources in question.
Quick question: Would it help if you restore the database from before the merge? We have similar problems in Gramps, where the default setting is that citations are merged even if they have notes.
I use Gramps as my main program, and RootsMagic Essentials for FamilySearch, which is why I attend both forums. And what you wrote here looks quite familiar.
Well I still have my RM7 database which I haven’t abandoned (yet?). So, no fear of what RM10 does or doesn’t do as I convert from 7 to 10. Reusable citations are a great benefit. RM8/9/10 is different from RM7 in a number of ways, and I’m still trying to see if I can accept the new look/feel/functionality and go forward with it.
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So you can simply delete your RM10 database and import from RM7 again to restore your RM10 database to before the merge as suggested by ennoborg. But doing so doesn’t change the basic issue that the citations with identical footnote/endnote text still have different notes and therefore still won’t merge. And doing so doesn’t change the even more basic issue that the “Reuse Endnote numbers” option in RM8/9/10 is not based on the footnote/endnote text as it is in RM7.