Are Duplicate Citations Hiding in Your RootsMagic File?
Do you have years’ worth of research stored in your genealogy database? If so, there’s a good chance you’ve accumulated some duplicate citations along the way. It’s easy to unknowingly enter the same source more than once—especially with frequently used sources like Find a Grave.
RootsMagic offers a built-in feature to automatically merge duplicate citations. However, I’ve been hesitant to use it, worried it might combine citations that are actually unique. Recently, though, as I’ve been creating ABC Biographies following Randy Seaver’s process, I’ve discovered that this workflow also gives me the opportunity to clean up and streamline my sources and citations.
While working on one such biography, I noticed several citations pointing to the same Find a Grave memorial. Fortunately, RootsMagic provides a way to merge citations one at a time—offering a safer, more controlled approach than the automatic merge feature. With thousands of Find a Grave citations in my file, reviewing each one manually is a daunting task. But I’ve found that citations used only once are a helpful clue that duplication may be present.
Here’s how I merge individual citations in RootsMagic:
- Highlight the citation I want to keep.
- Click the three vertical dots (⋮) at the top of the citation section.
- Select Merge Citations from the dropdown menu.
- Choose the second citation to compare.
- A side-by-side window appears, letting me verify the contents of both citations.
- If they match, I click Merge Duplicates to complete the process.
While it would be overwhelming to clean up all duplicates at once, I’ve found that these issues become more visible when working through narrative reports. So for now, I’ll continue using the process of writing ABC Biographies as an opportunity to clean up my citations—one at a time.