Have you ever been tempted to use the ‘merge’ feature in your genealogy software? It can certainly be tempting to let the computer search thru a file, identify duplicates and merge them.
I first encountered the use of this feature when Ancestry introduced One World Tree. The concept was a fantastic ‘crowd-sourcing’ idea. Have genealogists from all over the world submit their gedcom files and let the computers find the connections between those files to build one tree.
Yes, I’m dating myself, but this sounded FANTASTIC to this researcher trying to find her Crawford and Currey ancestors. Thus, I submitted my gedcom file. And, I quickly realized that the computers weren’t capable of analyzing the data and making the decisions on how to piece these files together.
The computer saw two James Crawfords who were born in 1758 and died in 1833 as one person — and merged them. It also say Hiram Mirick Currey and Hiram Merrick Currey as the same person — and merged them. My frustration with this ‘automatic merging’ can still be found on the Internet.
This experience has taught me to approach merging with extreme caution. Even though RootsMagic offers several options to merge people in my file, I know from my One World Tree experience that I want to have full control over what gets merged.
Thus, I only use the Manual Merge feature. This allows me to verify that the two individuals are indeed the same person.
As I’m venturing into RootsMagic 8, I’m investigating the merge features: particularly in terms of citations and sources.
The ability to merge citations sounds like a dream when working with sources. For example, I have a source for my great-grandfather’s bible.
This Bible record has been cited 26 times. Since this source and the citations were created in The Master Genealogist (TMG), they were created without attached images or transcriptions. In addition, the ‘citation’ simply tells me where I can find the photocopies from the Bible.
Thus, I would love the ability to merge these citations together. If merged, then I could attach the images and transcription ONE time instead of 26 times.
Clicking on the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the sources windows opens the menu for working with sources and citations.
Thus, when it comes to sources and citations, I currently have 3 options in RM8.
- Manual Merge
- Merge All Duplicate Sources
- Merge All Duplicate Citations
With over 4000 sources in my file, I’m sure I have duplicates. Scrolling to the Newspaper section showing the Dodge City papers reveals several potential duplicates.
So, out of curiosity, I decided to experiment with these ‘merge all’ functions. First of all, this in an experiment. Thus, I’m working with a COPY of my file. This way, I can play around with affecting my actual data. To try and document what happens, I’m going to compare before and after statistics. Before starting this process, my fiile contains 4975 sources and 75648 citations.
My first experiment was to merge all duplicate sources. For this process, the program is choosing what is merged.
When I compare the list of sources for the Dodge City newspaper AFTER the merge to that list (shown above) from before, it does appear that a couple of sources were merged.
- News-KS Dodge City Globe Republican ChroniclingAmerica EE
- News-KS Dodge City Reporter
A look at the file properties reveal that there are 4952 sources after the merge compared to 4975 from before the merge.
Comparing the two lists of Dodge City newspapers, it appears that the merge ONLY happened when the two sources were exactly alike. However, without taking the time to compare the entire lists of sources before and after, I have no idea weather two sources were merged that should not have been.
Even though I’m leary about this ‘merge all’ function, I wanted to see what happened when I used the ‘Merge All Citations’ tool. So I tried it on my ‘test’ database. Remember, I have over 75,000 citations for it to work its way thru. As the program is ‘cleaning duplicate citations,’ it is telling me how many it is merging – and it is rapidly scrolling thru the numbers. The scrolling is above 42,000 — thus at least 42,000 of my citations are being merged. When finished, there were 20,959 citations, down from 75,648.
A look back at the Bible record indicates that I now have 3 citations.
Thus, I could easily edit the citation used 23 times to make sure all of the images are attached and that a transcription has been added. Being able to do this task ONCE and not 23 times would be fantastic!
However, I cannot tell whether two (or more) citations were merged that should not have been merged. A searcch of the FB RM 8 Community Preview group for the term ‘merge’ reveals that others have the same reservations about this global merge feature. One member has documented the unwanted merging on citations.
Thus, based on these experiences and the issues reported by others, I will steer clear of the ‘merge all’ functions for People, Sources and Citations. And, I’m deleting that test file so that I don’t inadvertently get it open again.