I have imported numerous profiles into Gramps from MyHeritage, using Gedcoms. Apparently, all Source Citation Notes from many different people somehow got jammed into just a few Gramps Source records. For example, the single Source containing “U. S. Census, 1950” contains hundreds of Notes, one for each person.
Not sure if this is a bug with MH export, or a bug with Gramps import, a setting I don’t understand, or even perhaps not a bug at all.
My problem now is that when I create a Gedcom for export out from Gramps, the various Notes get distributed one each randomly and incorrectly to various different profiles. So for example, a Source Note associated with “Jane Doe” gets popped into the profile for “Robert Roe”.
I run this a lot, and I have a lot of citations that have empty date and volume/page fields. And with the default settings, this will ignore the fact that the citatiions are different, because they have different notes. And the result is exactly what you described here.
When I use it, I always make sure that the option for ’ Don’t merge if citation has notes’ is ON (Checked).
I cite the 5.1 manual here, but I bet that the default in 5.2 is exactly the same, and since the merge is sort of destructive, there is no easy way to restore things, other that restoring a backup from right after the import, assuming that you did not use the tool then, or doing the import again.
Thanks. I must have run the Merge Citations tool incorrectly. I can’t imagine why this tool would even be included in the package given the damage it can cause if used incorrectly.
It exists because GEDCOM does not support shared Citations. And Shared secondary objects are an efficient way of defining a relationship between the Parent Objects.
Good news. I found an old database backup from after the GEDcom import into Gramps, but before I mistakenly merged all the souce citations. Is there a procedure you can recommend to import into (a copy of) the older version with just the “good” changes I have made in the newer version of the database, such that I can add in all the new people, places, events, etc. but not bring in the “bad” citations?
The importmerge tool can show changes between the two dbs and allows you to choose which changes to keep. Please look at the wiki article before trying the addon.
I don’t see an easy one, because there is no way to export the good citations and import them where you want them. And the import merge tool recommended by @prculley can be quite overwhelming,
In this case, I’d probably remove the bad sources, which also deletes the merged notes attached to those. I’d also do that, because IMO the notes created by MH are quite a mess, and there are better ways to cite these sources.
You’re welcome. I hoped for a quick way to export people with specific sources from your old tree, but could not find a filter for that. And since you mentioned that you have hundreds of them, merging those would be a lot of work anyway.