I have been playing with using RM as the Master DB for Citations rather than accepting the ones from Ancestry.
I had loaded in the GRO User templates listed in the WIKI, and notice that the computed FootNote which shows fine in RM, is not exporting the values for the variables when exporting to a GEDCOM file or uploading to Ancestry via TreeShare.
The only GEDCOM tags that RM uses for the source and citation are the TITL and PAGE tags. For templated sources, RM exports the part of the sentence for Master Source variables to the TITL tag and the part of the sentence for the Source Details variables to the PAGE tag.
RM is essentially taking the completed citation sentence and exporting as two parts - the left part and the right part. Therefore, the only way that the sentence as a whole an be exported cleanly is if all the Master Source variables appear in the sentence to the left of all the Source Details variables and vice versa.
The GRO template has the [Repository] variable as a Master Source variable and it is at the far right end of the sentence. The only two ways to fix this problem are to make the [Repository] variable into a Source Details variable, or to move the [Repository] variable in the sentence to the left of all the Source Details variables. Since the GRO template appears to a custom source template rather than being one of RM’s built-in source templates, either of these solutions are available to you.
With the export option to include RM special features, the templates data is exported under custom tsgs along with the format you saw. Some software does import the templated citstions.
This source template’s Footnote sentence is made up of a mixture of source and citation variables. The Export to Ancestry or GEDCOM is rendering only the source variables when exporting source text to the TITL string and only the Citation variables for the PAGE string?
This does beg the question, as to what templates are recommended for maximum compatibility when using RM as the primary DB, but considering the need for future exports to other tools and platforms via GEDCOM or TreeShare?
Is it best, for instance, to only use the Free-Form source template?
I just want to chime in to concur with Tom’s observation that some genealogy software does support RM’s source templates as they are exported in RM’s GEDCOM. I personally use some genealogy software along with RM that does support RM’s source templates as they are exported in RM’s GEDCOM.
But some genealogy software does not support RM’s source templates as they are exported in RM’s GEDCOM. And the direct interfaces to Ancestry and FamilySearch do not use GEDCOM. In neither Ancestry nor FamilySearch does the direct interface provide RM any way of passing source templates along. So Ancestry and FamilySearch are prime examples of where RM’s citations sometimes cannot be replicated correctly in third party software when an RM source template does not comply with the “left part” and “right part” requirement.
I get around the problem by using source templates of my own design that only have a “left part”, so it’s impossible for the “left parts” and the “right parts” to become mixed up. But that’s an unusual way to approach the problem. You could use templates of your own design that comply with the “left part” and “right part” requirement. Or you can make a copy of any of RM’s source templates that have the problem and adjust them a bit so that they comply with the "left part and “right part” requirements. Another solution is free form templates, whether it be RM’s built-in free form template or the enhanced free form templates that Tom describes.
Those are really all the solutions there are. I’m not sure that any one of them is a universal best practice. You will just need to choose the solution that best meets your needs.
