I have found 244 unused citations after running the Enhanced Properties List tool in RM9. My question is, when I view these, how can I then delete them, and should I?
You must have put the citations in for some reason. Analyze a couple of them and you may find that they need to be relinked.
Obviously they were part of an entry at some point, but I suspect that they were associated with people I have subsequently deleted. Iām assuming this, as the same thing happens where any media associated with a person isnāt deleted when you delete that person.
I have checked one example (canāt see me doing this for 244) and that citation appears 5 times of which 2 of them arenāt tagged to anyone. Iām not sure what happens if I delete the untagged ones should I choose to go down that path or even if itās worth it. Not sure therefore of the benefit of this info shown in the Enhanced Properties List tool?
In the case of your example, you have 5 identical records in the database CitationTable, two of which having no associated records in the CitationLinkTable. While basically harmless, they are needless clutter and inflate statistics. Given a large enough database and high proportion of clutter, there would be some impact on performance.
You might consider whether to merge duplicate citations but beware of using the āmerge all dupā¦ā tool; it ignores any differences in media and webtags when checking for duplicates.
I agree that these citations with no tags to anyone, remain in the database as clutter. So again, it is unclear why this tool does show how many there are of these, there are no other benefits, (unless future updates will add something more meaningful).
I seem to recall that in RM8, merging citations created issues when using Ancestry TreeShare. Not sure if this has been fixed in RM9?
The issue with the āMerge All Duplicate Citationsā remains in RM9. It fails to take into account differences in citation media and citation webtags and will merge otherwise duplicates, especially those coming via TreeShare from certain repositories on Ancestry.
So if you have two citations, one with a media attached, and the other without media, does the āMerge all duplicate Citationsā keep the media with the merged Citation?
Yes, I think so. All the tags, whether Media or Web, are collected under the one remaining Citation.
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