Family Historian User Group

I'm a lumper and would like to see a menu option for the Citations to Source records to enable you to select a citation and it lists all identical citations that match it, then allow you to edit one and update all the other matching citations.

There is a "gotcha" with this, as I found when trying to locate the citations for my great-aunt's birth.

How do you define an identical citation? At the moment that "Show Source Record's Citations" shows the citations as they would be if printed. Currently my (printed) Citation Details for Generic Sources are set to exclude "Text From Source". I use the GRO Registration Index as a Method 2 Lumped Source so that means that all citations to the GRO Registration Index done on the same date (Citation Detail Entry Date), with the same Assessment and the same Where Within Source (empty in my case for the GRO Registration Index) would be identical in that query, even if nothing to do with one another. What I had to do was temporarily include "Text from Source", run the command to find the relevant citations for my great-aunt and do whatever. And then exclude "Text from Source" again.

So - what is an identical citation? Identical based on the print? Or identical based on the printed and unprinted data items? And are notes included or excluded in the check for equality? Presumably it could all be parameterised but it needs to be thought through.

Yes, the crux of this requirement is the definition of an identical citation.

A generic Citation has about 10 types of subsidiary fields and some can have multiple instances.
A templated Citation can have innumerable additional fields.
Must they all hold identical values to be considered an identical citation?

The Where Used Record Links plugin when analysing Source records provides a Key column in the Result Set to identify what it considers are identical citations.

IMO this request is effectively a repeat of the Viewing and editing citations (19829) request and is very closely related to the Using XML vs Gedcom to store data (21272) request.

I'm looking at a plugin to perform this. With the Citations to Source record list, using the citation (footnote Text) column to be a guide to select matching footnote text. Then bring up a property box for one of the persons using that record and edit it. Then have the addon do a copy/paste to to each of the events using that citation. Right now I have a source for the 1910 census with over a hundred records with the Census events and occupations with about a quarter of them listing occupations of the children. It's very time consuming having to go through each person in the census and doing a delete, and paste for each child. FH7 is my go to genealogy program, but the citations section is a real pain for a lumper. This is especially an annoying problem when you transfer a gedcom into a new project.

I say again: The crux of this requirement is the definition of an identical citation.

Saying the Footnote text is a guide is not rigorous enough for any software to select Citations.
(Are you saying the software uses the guide to present a list of candidate Citations for the user to select from?)
It also only works where the Footnote Format involves Citation-specific fields.
Any 'popular' solution needs a definition of identical citations that is acceptable to most 'lumper' users.

Presumably, one of the criteria for identical citations is that they all link to the same Source record?

It is not possible for a Plugin to open a Property Box to allow editing of a Citation.
So designing a Plugin that knows all identical citations and allows edits to one to propagate to all of them is a challenge.

If the criteria for identical citations does not include each and every Citation field, then the set of identical citations will contain differences, i.e. some may have Media attached or some Note text and others may not.
When the edited Citation is propagated to all the other identical citations what happens to those differences?
e.g. If the edited Citation adds/removes a Media attachment or changes the Note text, what happens in the other Citations where the edited version is in conflict with its own fields?

Ok, I took a month off from genealogy and came back. Look at my citations again and playing around, I found if I edit the main citation at persons property window and then share it that only one copy of the citation is created but shared. I then had to go to each person in the census and then delete extra census entry. I couldn't find anything about this behaviour on the web but guess it's been there for a while with FH7. I'm now a happy Lumper again. No more editing all the identical citations.