I would imagine this is a familiar sight for anyone who’s imported a GEDCOM from Ancestry.com into Gramps:
Row on row of near-useless citations, sometimes hundreds of them. I assume this is because sometimes–I’m not entirely sure what determines when–Ancestry GEDCOMs will identify a citation only by the _APID. The citation above comes from this bit of a GEDCOM:
2 SOUR
3 _APID 1,1500::5449717
3 _APID 1,61378::900255513
3 _APID 1,6742::24156265
3 _APID 1,7602::51634323
3 _APID 1,6061::21589392
In each APID, the bit before the colons represents a particular collection on Ancestry.com and the bit after the colons represents a particular entry in that collection. So these are citations from five different sources that have been separated from other citations in their own sources and squished together in one citation. It would take an absurd amount of tedious work to split and merge all of these citations until it was one source per collection and one citation per APID.
So I’m planning to create an addon that will do that work for me. I can think of two ways I could go about this: either an importer, or a tool that will clean these up after the fact. An importer might ultimately be the most elegant solution, but I’m leaning towards starting with a tool as that sounds quicker and more approachable for a novice developer. All I would really need the tool to do would be to fill any empty source title fields with the first part of the APID and any empty Volume/Page fields with the second part of the APID, and that would make it much easier to see which sources need to be merged and I could take care of the citations with the existing “Merge Citations” tool.
Does that sound useful to anyone else? Is anyone working on, or interested in working on, something similar? What would y’all want out of a Gramps addon for working with Ancestry records?