I am a long time RM user, loving RM7. I jumped into RM8 with both feet. Then I realized how badly RM8 converted my sources from RM7. I can not figure out what the protocol was or if the was one. Why did the conversion blend some sources together that did not belong together? Is there a quick fix for this or do I just need to spend the next 5 years trying to sort it all out? I wish I had checked this out before adding over 400 names to my database.
To give you an idea of what happened…
RM7 had 807 Sources with 91726 Citations. After the conversion to RM8 I have 590 Sources and 17651 Citations. Where did the rest of my stuff go in RM8?
Can anybody help me figure this out?
Did you merge duplicate Sources and Citations after importing? That would be the most obvious reason for counts to decrease. You might want to perform a test and re-import your RM7 db to a test rm8 db, then merge duplicate Sources and Citations and see if the counts are close to what you see in your current RM8 db.
RM8’s citations are intended to be reused. Suppose you created a citation in RM7. Suppose you memorized that citation and pasted it four other places. That’s five copies of the citations in all. Now suppose you import this RM7 database into RM8 and run the Merge Duplicate Citation procedure. You will now have just one citation but it will be used five different times. Nothing will have been lost.
The advantage of the RM8 way of doing is when you need to make a correction to a citation due to a typo or some other cause. In my RM7 example, you would have had to make the same correction five different times. After moving your data to RM8 and merging your citations, you would only have to make the correction one time because there is only one citation that is used five times. In RM7, there were five separate citations that were used one time each.
1 Like
Renee helped a person with a similar problem where the person imported from RM7 to RM8 and it looked like not everything imported. Renee wrote:
What we have seen happen in these cases is the wrong RM7 file was imported. To confirm that, customize the People List to include the Date Edited column. You will see a difference in the dates people were edited in RM7 and RM8. You will also see different record numbers at some point.
To do a new import first close the current file (File, Close File). Then start a new import but click on Browse to make sure you are absolutely selecting the correct RM7 file to import. Follow the pathname at the top of RM7 when that database is open. You can do this import with the file open in RM7 at the same time.
Thanks. I am quite sure I have the right file.
Thanks for the response. I have been trying to figure this out. I did a merge and the results were crazy. I do not know if the merge created the issue or the conversion from RM7 to RM*. One example,… I use Findagrave frequently and have many memorials as sources. But, usually it will only be used once or twice …like for the person and maybe a spouse. The conversion has blended as many as 600 of these sources all together. So, now I have a citation for Findagrave tagged or used 600 times. The problem is that it only really should be tagged to one or two people and the other 598 tags have no relationship to the citation. The conversion has erroneously filled the “citation” field with the URL for the findagrave.com cite, or maybe the memorial #. Why does the program fill the citation field with something that doesn’t belong there and group it together with 500 or 400 others.
I wonder if you could post an RM7 example of a couple citations for different memorials in Findagrave that were merged into the same citation in RM8. This sounds like an impossible situation - like that the citations in RM7 that were for different memorials were really the same. And since they were the same, RM8 merged them.
Well, I think we have to look at exactly what is considered the same citation by the Merge Duplicate Citations process. It’s not your situation exactly, but TreeShare users have reported that some citations imported from Ancestry are different but differ only in being associated with a different image file. But RM8’s Merge Duplicate Citations process does not take the different image files into account when determining which citations are duplicate. It seems to me that for the TreeShare case, the design of Merge Duplicate Citations was in error in not taking the different images into account. There is nothing that I can think of that TreeShare users can do on the Ancestry side of the house to make their citations look different when they are imported into RM. And by the way, it’s not all Ancestry citations that have this problem when imported into RM. It’s just some of them.
So I’m wondering if maybe your RM7 citations for Findagrave actually are different in some sense, but that the sense in which they are different is not picked up by the Merge Duplicate Citation process. That’s why I’m suggesting that you post an example of two “different” citations in RM7 that are being merged by Merge Duplicate Citations in RM8. What is it about those “different” citations that is not being picked up my Merge Duplicate Citations?
1 example. My source “Findagrave.com” has 3832 citations. I poke the > and I see a list of those citations. Here’s one. FAGM-Richard Bertoch. This is used 19 times. It has 3 Web tags, each are for a different Findagrave memorial. Out of the 19 times it is used it serves 13 different people. It appears that maybe only 3 of these are accurate. So, ten people have this citation now that has nothing pertaining to them. So, now I go back to RM7 and look at each of these 13 people and see that the source is mostly just a reference. In RM7 this source is mostly blank, with no details… no research notes and no details. In RM7 only 3 times does the source have details. So, RM8 took this source and expanded it to include others for some reason. Now I have to go and verify and delete and confirm.
It sounds like RM8’s Merge Duplicate Citations is not testing to see if the WebTags are different. Are you saying that there are three different identical citations in RM7, each with a different WebTag? Or are you saying that a single citation in RM7 has three different WebTags?
However, I wonder if there is a deeper problem in your data in RM7. Take your example of FAGM-Richard Bertoch. Let’s start with the most basic question. Which source template are you using for FAGM-Richard Bertoch? It should be one of three possibilities: 1) the free form template, 2) one of RM’s built-in template, or 3) a custom template that you designed or possibly that you imported.
You might want to do another Import of 7 database into a NEW 8 database and see your results. Do a backup of the new database before you work on it. You can do merge etc at that point.
I started over. Imported my RM7 into RM8. This time I noted the property details of the file in 7 and then the 8. When compared the details are mostly the same. The same number of people, places, events, sources, etc. I open the new RM8 file and look at my sources and I am finding similar issues as before. I have the same number of sources, but it appears that RM8 fills the “Citation name” field with what ever it can grab…not in all cases. At this point I do NOT trust the automatic merge command for sources.
If you click on a fact source icon in the list of facts for a person in RM7, you get a screen listing the sources and the “details”. These “details” become the citation name in RM8. In my case, most of my sources are free-form with no “details”, so the citation name in RM8 is blank. Where I have used templates for sources, the citation name is constructed from the detail fields in the template. I realised that I needed to carefully modify the templates I was using to automatically build the citation names I wanted to see in RM8.
1 Like