RM9 Moving a citation from one source to another

I recently imported my RM7 database into RM9 and discovered that I have a large number of citations that should be attached to the source 1911 England and Wales census but have been wrongly attached to the source 1921 England and Wales census. I was hoping there would be an option like “change fact type” that would allow me to clean up the database quickly. I really don’t want to have to re enter all of the information AND reattach media for all these entries.
I know this was asked in 2021 but I couldn’t tell which version the answer applied to.

Some clarification is needed to understand your situation. Is “1921 Census”:

  • a custom fact?
  • a standard Census fact dated 1921?
  • a Master Source so-named?

Likewise for “1911 Census”.

I have created a source for each census eg 1911 England and Wales Census 1870 United States Federal Census and so on. When I looked at my list of citations for the 1921 England and Wales Census I noticed a lot that had RG14 references (ie 1911) not RG15 which is 1921. Further investigation showed I must have selected the wrong source by accident when creating these and I need to reassign the RG14 citations to the correct 1911 source. Each citation has an image attached to it and full details of the census entry - each member of the family and their details so it is a lot of data to recreate from scratch.

If you selected the wrong source and added a citation to it there isn’t a way to move the citation to a different source. You will need to enter a new citation under the correct source.

To move the 1921 Citations having RG14 references to the 1911 Census Master Source is possible with custom sqlite operations directly on the database, provided the 1911 and 1921 Census use the same Source Template. The operations will only take fractions of a second to execute, considerably more time to write, test, apply and verify - maybe an hour for someone proficient in SQL and knowing the RM7 database structure.

Please post the reference.

https://community.rootsmagic.com/t/moving-a-citation-from-one-source-to-another/1942?u=kaitlinb

Had I commented on that topic then, I would have made the same response as I have to you. It very much depends on there being a common Source Template, what other changes in the Citation data may be needed and the user’s knowledge of SQLite and RM data structures.

If the current source for the citation and the desired source for the citation use the same source template, the fix in trivial in SQL. But to avoid the SQL, I have a little utility that makes the change. Works great.

Check out the fifth item " RootsMagic Change Source for a Citation Utility" on my home page-
https://richardotter.github.io/

If the source template are not the same, I have another utility for that as well, but I haven’t released it yet. It requires more user setup to specify how the old fields are mapped to the new ones. Let me know if interested.

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Neat! I hadn’t noticed that you have compiled executables so it’s not necessary to install python. Great!

I see the .py comment says:

##   RootsMagic v7, v8 or v9 database file

but it cannot be compatible with RM7 because it relies on the CitationName value which did not exist in that version.

Also, @KaitlinB , check that your Citation Name(s) for the 1921 Census having the RG14 references is(are) distinctly different from the Citation Names for those with the correct RG15 references. They probably are because the upgrade procedure should have automatically generated the Citation Names with the Citation Detail which would have included the “RG” value.

Also, Richard’s utility will move one Citation at a time. If you have 100 to move, you will have to run it 100 times but that will still be an order of magnitude or more faster than the process within the RM UI.

Now if only the RM developers were to incorporate it into RM9.1.4…