82 replies to this topic

[mmurosky]

Jerry: Thanks much for the informative explanation of what RM is doing with citations; I concluded that, given I have in excess of 32,900 individuals in my FTM file, RM is likely not the software that will work for me.  That is, I have many, many citations to individuals that just didn't make the transformation.  I tried a free version of Legacy Family Tree and it maintained the citation links to individuals and details such as a marriage source citation for an individual.  Consequently, I'm moving on from RM to Legacy.  There are many aspects of RM that I liked, but the citation issue was a deal-breaker for me.

Thanks again,

Perking812

 

Thank you Jerry for sharing - all of my sources are set up in a way that I have multiple links supported from one citation. I don't really want to move to having multiple versions of the same citation. Maybe I am old school - or it is my engineering background coming out - but I prefer having one place for a citation. 

[tschlarm]

I just created a simple census source using the FTM2014 census template US Population schedule 1880-1940. I filled in every field for the FTM Source (equivalent to RM7 Master Source) including media. The citation in FTM for that source I also filled in every field including a media item.

 

This is what I see after conversion.

 

RM7 Master Source = FTM Source Title

RM7 Short Footnote = FTM Source Title

RM7 Bibliography = FTM Source Title with a period appended by RM7

 

RM7 treats this as a Free-form source (FTM source was a census template). As such the only field available in Source Details is Page Number.

 

RM7 Source Details/Page Number = FTM citation detail

 

RM7 Master Text/Source Text is blank

RM7 Master Text Source Comments: This was formatted by FTM as a GEDCOM note and imported as is by RM7 (I looked in the GEDCOM to verify).

 

RM7 Detail Text/Research Notes = FTM Citation Text

RM7 Detail Text/Comments = FTM Citation Text

RM7 Media/Detail Only = FTM Citation Media

RM7 Media/Source Only = FTM Source Media

 

This particular template did not have a repository on the FTM side so the repository was left blank.

 

I can do additional things like this (non-template FTM sources/citation) if folks are interested. They will all become Free-form sources, however and everything in the FTM citation detail will end up in the RM7 Page Number field.

 

Hope this helps.

[mmurosky]

One thought I have after looking at the screen shots from FTM is that where source data from FTM should go in RM depends to a certain extent on whether the RM user is primarily a source splitter or a source lumper. Another thought I have after looking at the screen shots from FTM is that FTM appears to have a source and citation data model that RM is desperately lacking and that therefore it is hard to map the FTM source data to RM in a way that makes any sense. Let's see if I can describe these ideas a little more clearly.

 

FTM appears to have a named list of Source Groups. I think for most users, these Source Groups would come closest to corresponding to Master Sources in RM. You can get a list of RM Master Sources just like you can get a list of FTM Source Groups.

 

FTM appears to have a named list of Source Citations and a list of all of the facts to which each named "Source citation" is linked. It is of particular interest that each "Source Citation" in FTM appears to be able to be linked to multiple facts. RM does have source citations, but they are not named and you cannot easily get a list of them. And each one of them is linked to exactly one fact in RM.  Indeed, if you want the "same citation" in RM to link to multiple facts, what you really get is a separate and identical copy of the citation rather than the "same citation". This design feature of RM is the root cause of why it's so difficult to make changes to every occurrence of the same citation - because there is no such thing in RM as "every occurrence of the same citation". Each citation only occurs once, and to make changes you have to find every citation and change it individually, and there is no list of the citations that's really comparable to the list in FTM. I would be deeply indebted to the demise of FTM and to the influx of FTM refugees into RM if these events would induce RM to adopt the same citation model that FTM seems to have.

 

Having ranted thusly, and given RM's existing and inadequate data model for sources and citations, where do I think FTM's Citation Detail and Citation Text fields should go in RM? Well, if the RM user is a source splitter, then the FTM data should go into RM's Source Text and Source Comment fields in RM's Master Source. And if the RM user is a source lumper, then the FTM data should go into RM's Research Notes and Comments fields in RM's Source Detail. But I doubt that RM's import of FTM data provides FTM users with the option of making such a choice.

 

Advice for FTM users: don't worry too much about what RM's Source Text, Source Comments, Research Notes, and Comments fields are called. They are all really just notes. Think of them as Note1, Note2, Note3, and Note4. Note1 and Note2 are associated with RM's Master Source which appears to be like FTM's Source Groups. Note3 and Note4 are associated with RM's Detail Text which appears to be like FTM's Source Citations only without the ability to name them or to get a list of them very easily. But do consider very carefully Laura's advice about which of these notes can and cannot be printed in association with footnotes and endnotes. What I'm calling Note3 and Note4 can be printed along with footnotes and endnotes, and what I'm calling Note1 and Note2 cannot be. In the language of RM, Research Notes and Comments can be printed along with footnotes and endnotes, whereas Source Text and Source Comments cannot be printed along with footnotes and endnotes.

 

Jerry

 

 

Jerry,

 

Can I just confirm that I understand your explanation correctly? 

In this example I have a death certificate that contains 11 links - it links to both people, events and facts.

 

Does your post intended to mean that if I wanted to do this in RootsMagic I would need 11 separate citations for the same source? 
 

[TomH]

RM7 Detail Text/Research Notes = FTM Citation Text

This is logically consistent with the way FTM imports from Ancestry.com and the intended usage of the RM Detail Text/Research Notes and the GEDCOM spec. This is where transcripts of the source detail go.

 

RM7 Detail Text/Comments = FTM Citation Text

Is this not the consequence of a setting in FTM where you can have the value of its "Citation text" field included in its "Reference note" field? The latter is mapped per GEDCOM to the RM Detail text/Comments field and that is logically consistent.

Also, the URL of the citation can optionally be included in the FTM "Reference notes" field. The URL is exported by FTM as a custom _LINK tag that RootsMagic currently ignores but the NOTE tag is standard. As the URL would always be the last line in the imported RM Comments field, there might be a way of creating a RM Webtag from it. I don't know if there is a way to edit the GEDCOM so that RM would think it is a WebTag on import - that would require some experimentation.

 

It would be better for all if the RootsMagician could program out all these anomalies on import and as per Ben Sayer, the FTM developers program out some of their wonky stuff.

[Jerry Bryan]

 

 

Does your post intended to mean that if I wanted to do this in RootsMagic I would need 11 separate citations for the same source? 

 

What you would do in RM would be to create the citation one time, then Memorize it and Paste it in the ten other places it needs to be.

 

This sort of gives you the feel that you have one citation with eleven links. But what it really does is create eleven separate but identical citations with one link each.

 

As I said, there is no direct equivalent to the Citation list that you guys posted for FTM so you can't see very directly what has happened from the Memorize and Paste process. The closest you can come to the Citation list is Lists->Source List, choose a Master Source, and click Print. This creates a report in memory that's all the citations associated with that Master Source. You can just look at the report on the screen, or you can print it on paper. Or you can save  the report as a text file, as a PDF file, or as an RTF file. If you just look at the report on the screen, you are locked into a modal Window and you can't access any other part of RM until you dismiss the Window. So most users tend to save the report to a file to work with.

 

In my experience, the report for a Master Source typically may have hundreds or even thousands of lines of data because it's a report of all the citations for the Master Source, not just a listing of the occurrences of the particular citation that you are interested in.

 

Jerry

[mmurosky]

 

 

 

 

What you would do in RM would be to create the citation one time, then Memorize it and Paste it in the ten other places it needs to be.

 

This sort of gives you the feel that you have one citation with eleven links. But what it really does is create eleven separate but identical citations with one link each.

 

As I said, there is no direct equivalent to the Citation list that you guys posted for FTM so you can't see very directly what has happened from the Memorize and Paste process. The closest you can come to the Citation list is Lists->Sources, choose a Master Source, and click Print. This creates a report in memory that's all the citations associated with that Master Source. You can just look at the report on the screen, or you can print it on paper. Or you can save  the report as a text file, as a PDF file, or as an RTF file. If you just look at the report on the screen, you are locked into a modal Window and you can't access any other part of RM until you dismiss the Window. So most users tend to save the report to a file to work with.

 

In my experience, the report for a Master Source typically may have hundreds or even thousands of lines of data because it's a report of all the citations for the Master Source, not just a listing of the occurrences of the particular citation that you are interested in.

 

Jerry

 

Thank you for the clarification. That helps to explain it better. I guess I need to determine if that is a deal breaker for me.  It seems like potentially a lot of work if you need to update a source. 

[TomH]

 

In this example I have a death certificate that contains 11 links - it links to both people, events and facts.

 

 

Does your post intended to mean that if I wanted to do this in RootsMagic I would need 11 separate citations for the same source? 

 

 

As I indicated earlier, GEDCOM does not support a master citation linked to multiple things. FTM exports as many separate citations as you see in that list. It would take some magic to merge them back into one shared master citation but RM's database design does not support it anyway. I see that FTM does do that magic which is one reason its import process is so slow - that is a lot of string comparing to do.

 

In the current RM database design, the closest one could come would be as Jerry said - extreme splitting of sources such that what would ordinarily be in the source details (aka citation details) is stored in the master source. Jerry led the way in this regard while I developed some SQLite scripts to play with the concept. You can find references to both at Sources - Adventures in Extreme Splitting.

[Laura]

Any change made to a Master source changes the Master source for everyone regardless of the entries made in Source details.

If I want to make changes to Source details, I can copy the entry in the Source details, Page Number box and paste it into the search box in Find Everywhere accessed from the Search menu.  

The search results will be every Source Citation that has that Page Number entry.

Clicking on Citation opens the Edit source screen that opens on Edit Person, Citation manager.

I can make my changes in the first Citation and copy it.  Then, I open each of the other Citations in turn and paste the change.

I usually use the Page number entry so the results will probably be restricted to Citations in my database, but it could be parts of the entry in Research notes or Comments.

[Laura]

tschlarm, Posted Today, 02:46 PM

 

"I just created a simple census source using the FTM2014 census template US Population schedule 1880-1940. I filled in every field for the FTM Source (equivalent to RM7 Master Source) including media. The citation in FTM for that source I also filled in every field including a media item.

 

This is what I see after conversion.

 

RM7 Master Source = FTM Source Title

RM7 Short Footnote = FTM Source Title

RM7 Bibliography = FTM Source Title with a period appended by RM7

 

RM7 treats this as a Free-form source (FTM source was a census template). As such the only field available in Source Details is Page Number.

 

RM7 Source Details/Page Number = FTM citation detail

 

RM7 Master Text/Source Text is blank

RM7 Master Text Source Comments: This was formatted by FTM as a GEDCOM note and imported as is by RM7 (I looked in the GEDCOM to verify).

 

RM7 Detail Text/Research Notes = FTM Citation Text

RM7 Detail Text/Comments = FTM Citation Text

RM7 Media/Detail Only = FTM Citation Media

RM7 Media/Source Only = FTM Source Media

 

This particular template did not have a repository on the FTM side so the repository was left blank.

 

I can do additional things like this (non-template FTM sources/citation) if folks are interested. They will all become Free-form sources, however and everything in the FTM citation detail will end up in the RM7 Page Number field.

 

Hope this helps."

 

tschlarm, thanks for your experiment.
I have a vague idea that older versions of gedcom had a character limit for a Free form, Page Number box.  I am not sure if my memory is faulty, and,  I don't know if that is true of Gedcom 5.5.

Before I went too far changing long notes from "Citation text" to "Citation details", I would do some experimenting and see if long "Citation Details" get truncated either in export from FTM or import into RM.

I don't have FTM to experiment with.

[tschlarm]

I just plugged in all the default facts in FTM and converted to RM7. Here's what I found:

 

Given name, surname and sex go to the proper fields in RM7.

 

A second Name field goes to RM7 Alt Name.

 

FTM Address/Phone/Email are put in the Primary Address field on the address tab in RM7

 

FTM Bat Mitzvah goes to Bas Mitzvah in RM7 (in GEDCOM this way)

 

Also Known As goes to RM7 Alt Name

 

Circumcision is dropped (_CIRC in GEDCOM)

 

Confirmation (LDS) - Description in the date field in RM7

 

Cause of Death moved to RM7 Death description field

 

Degree dropped (_DEG in GEDCOM)

 

Divorce description dropped

 

Elected dropped (_ELEC in GEDCOM)

 

Employment dropped (_EMPLOY in GEDCOM)

 

Excommunication dropped (_EXCM in GEDCOM)

 

Funeral dropped (_FUN in GEDCOM)

 

Initatory (LDS) dropped (_INIT in GEDCOM)

 

Medical Condition seems to go to Person Notes. Seemed to take 1st word skip the rest add a ':' then append the description.

 

Mission (LDS) dropped (_MISN in GEDCOM)

 

Military Serial Number dropped (_MILTID in GEDCOM)

 

Ordinance dropped (_ORDI in GEDCOM)

 

Physical Description goes to RM7 Description

 

Height dropped (_HEIG in GEDCOM)

 

Weight dropped (_WEIG in GEDCOM)

 

Namesake dropped (_NAMS in GEDCOM)

 

Social Security Number goes to RM7 SSN

 

Destination dropped (_NAMS in GEDCOM)

 

Origin dropped (_ORIG in GEDCOM)

 

Separation dropped (_SEPR in GEDCOM)

 

Relationship ID dropped (REFN in GEDCOM)

 

Person Id goes to RM7 Ref #

 

Ancestral File Number goes to RM7 AFN

 

All the other default fields come across as expected. In FTM you can create custom facts so those may or may not make it.

 

The _* tag items in GEDCOM are vendor defined (per GEDCOM specification) so I guess it's not surprising that RM7 doesn't bring them all in. The good side of this is that most of these are lesser used and they all make it out of FTM and into the GEDCOM file. If RM wants to they can read them in.

[Laura]

I just downloaded a new update to RM 7.

It deals with some of the isssues on importing a FTM gedcom mentioned in these forums.

See what is included in the update at

http://forums.rootsm...update-history/

[CLMartin]

Thank you, Michelle, for assisting me with the citation issue using your screen shot to show how FTM works.

 

I want to see my citation at a glance. I’m a last glancer.

 

Thank all of you for your assistance in figuring this out.  Now that I know what the issues are in RM, I know what I need to do and am as happy a camper as can be expected!!!

 

Thanks again!

 

Connie

[TomH]

I just downloaded a new update to RM 7.
It deals with some of the isssues on importing a FTM gedcom mentioned in these forums.
See what is included in the update at
http://forums.rootsm...update-history/

...and as Bruce posted on Facebook:

We have released a new update for RootsMagic 7 users, version 7.0.9.0. This update allows the citation media for a person to be seen in the person's media album, and tweaks the GEDCOM import for FTM files to preserve 1) the profile picture, 2) long fact descriptions, and 3) the citation links to online images.

Making the citation media visible in the person's media album has been an outstanding wish for some time. Thanks to you FTM émigrés for creating the pressure to get it done. Let's hope there ma be some more benefits to RM users from this peak of interest and the competition to attract FTM users.

[Renee Zamora]

Making the citation media visible in the person's media album has been an outstanding wish for some time. Thanks to you FTM émigrés for creating the pressure to get it done. Let's hope there ma be some more benefits to RM users from this peak of interest and the competition to attract FTM users.

 

That one's still being worked on. We didn't want to stop this update until that enhancement was finished, because the others were effected importing data. Exposing hidden data after an import, can still be addressed after an import has happened. Of course, at this point we don't know how long programming this will take, so I can't say when the next update will be.

[CLMartin]

Exactly Michelle.

 

Thank you for assisting me with the citation issue using your screen shot to show how FTM works.

 

I want to see my citation at a glance. I’m a last glancer.

 

Thank all of you for your assistance in figuring this out.  Now that I know what the issues are in RM, I know what I need to do and am as happy a camper as can be expected!!!

 

Thanks again!

 

Connie

[CLMartin]

All the other default fields come across as expected. In FTM you can create custom facts so those may or may not make it.

 

 

I have quite a few custom fields in FTM.  They all made it through the gedcom experience into RM7. Yeah!

[CLMartin]

Okay, for now at least, the last issue I would love to address is:

 

The date and description for an image does not transfer from the FTM2014 gedcom to RM7.  Actually, all the dates are empty, but the descriptions have a funny code: @N182@   The numbers are different for each image.  Hopefully this little code will help in determining what is happening.

 

Thank you.

[tschlarm]

Okay, for now at least, the last issue I would love to address is:

 

The date and description for an image does not transfer from the FTM2014 gedcom to RM7.  Actually, all the dates are empty, but the descriptions have a funny code: @N182@   The numbers are different for each image.  Hopefully this little code will help in determining what is happening.

 

Thank you.

 

The @ codes are GEDCOM links (the GEDCOM spec has another term for them, but that's what I call them). That way they can have 1 source (or picture) linked to multiple people. 

 

The only attributes of an image that appear to be exported into the gedcom is the caption, the path to the image and the Private setting. The Date, Description and Categories values appear to not be exported into the GEDCOM.

 

Only the FTM developers can fix this one.

 

Edit 12/18/2015:

Thanks to TomH for providing another idea. If when you export from FTM instead of choosing the Other option, you choose FTM2012 the Date and Descriptions on images will be exported into GEDCOM. RM7 will import the Image Description, but not the Date. For interested developers a tag example is:

 

0 @M1@ OBJE

1 FILE c:\......\image.jpg

2 TITL FTM Image Caption

2 DATE 12/17/2015 11:00:00 PM

2 TEXT FTM image description

 

The other change of note is FTM changes the tag for the cause of death fact and so it is not imported. Also for DEVS:

If you export to GEDCOM/Other the Cause of Death is (this works):

2 CAUS Cause of death

 

If you export to GEDCOM/FTM2012 then (this doesn't work):

1 _DCAUS Cause of Death

 

The last item of note for DEVs is the NOTE tag. If you export to GEDCOM/Other then note text is repeated each time they occur. If you export to GEDCOM/FTM2012 then the notes are in the GEDCOM file only once as a reference and where they are linked to they use references: i.e. @N1@

 

Other than that, the rest of the GEDCOM test files exported either way are identical. I used the RM7 compare files and the only difference is the Death Fact: GEDCOM/Other shows cause of death in the description, but does not show the death description, GEDCOM/FTM2012 loses the COD fact, but shows the description.

 

Side note: I wish the source and citation comparison in RM7 was as nice as the person comparison or at least we could open 2 dialogs instead of locking us into a single one we have to flip between.

 

Hopefully this helps the RM7 devs get us a more complete import. Any questions, let me know. I'm happy to send my test files if you need them.

[CLMartin]

 

The @ codes are GEDCOM links (the GEDCOM spec has another term for them, but that's what I call them). That way they can have 1 source (or picture) linked to multiple people. 

 

The only attributes of an image that appear to be exported into the gedcom is the caption, the path to the image and the Private setting. The Date, Description and Categories values appear to not be exported into the GEDCOM.

 

Only the FTM developers can fix this one.

 

Oh! Crud!  Very bad news indeed.  Thanks much for the info.

[mmurosky]

 

 

The @ codes are GEDCOM links (the GEDCOM spec has another term for them, but that's what I call them). That way they can have 1 source (or picture) linked to multiple people. 

 

The only attributes of an image that appear to be exported into the gedcom is the caption, the path to the image and the Private setting. The Date, Description and Categories values appear to not be exported into the GEDCOM.

 

Only the FTM developers can fix this one.

 

Hello,

 

This is a Family Tree Maker Screen Shot of media (from my tree) to clarify what the date, description and category fields look like. 

 

 

It is understandable other packages can't pick these items up if the GEDCOM doesn't export them.