When I click on the Sources tab in RM11 using windows 11, I get a list with many sources per the attached document and many are the same source “1930 US Census” in this case. I know there is a “merge all duplicate sources” under the “Tools” tab. I am skeptical of using this tool because I remember someplace back in my decrepit memory someone complained about using a tool similar to this and it caused major problems. My question is this, is the merge sources tool a good way to combine all these sources or should I be doing this some other way " My other feature request would be, that it seems it would be nice if I could select a sub set of these to merge (via check box or search) rather than just one tool click and wham bang it does every source in the database whether I want it to or not. What is the general consensus here?
In my experience this happens when you tree share from Ancestry, who will create a separate source on every occasion you save a particular fact (say 1930 US Census). It is likely when you go into RM that most of those sources will have media attached (the image of the census page) that you can view at a few clicks. My concern would be that if you merged all the sources then all those different images would be combined and attached to each person in your database with that source, making it unusable or it may just delete them, I’m no techie.
On the rare occasions that I need a 1 off source (say a record from Scotland’s People) I tend to dump the source into the description field of the fact rather than go through the tedious process of creating a new source. I now expect to get howls of protest from purists but, hey, it’s my database!!
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Make sure you have backups before you do anything.
there are ways to merge them (other than each one manually)
I am not going to advise what steps are correct for your situation, as the order in which you merge citations or source can matter. It sounds like it likely they came from Treeshare
also see
Thanks for the information. I have fallen prey to tree share before and I’m sure that is culprit here as well. I have now completely sworn off of tree share due to these sorts of problems and now will manually enter all my sources in RM. I guess I was wondering if anyone could tell me if the tool was an easy way out of my predicament. I’ll check to see if there is media attached to these before attempting a repair. I just finished cleaning up my media links and don’t want to create another mess. Thanks again!
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I recall I had a Mess when I moved to RM8 (believe it was still preview at time or maybe just after it went offical) – at the time there was a bug the compounded things that actually made things worse after merging – but that is why you backup (that bug was later fixed). I recommend making at least 2 backups before doing anything. I am going to leave someone else to advise on the best steps to resolve your situation – Merge duplicates is limited on what it can do as wont merge “close” duplicates.
Update: 10.0.1 - Fixed: Merge all duplicate citations no longer merges citations with blank names and fields.
This update prevents the merging of blank citations that caused an issue with those most likely to merge incorrectly with media and webtags.
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