Citations Invisible – Reveal and Revert #citations #sources #ftm2014 #ftm2012 #ancestrycom #gedcom

With the flurry of users of Family Tree Maker looking to migrate their database to RootsMagic, an outcry has gained volume because of the disappearance of some citations. This problem was described here in 2012 in Citations Invisible Revealed which offered two scripts, both of which are available in the RMtrix utility, one to find such citations for the Primary (Preferred Name), the other to convert them to citations for the Person. That was an irreversible conversion. In the hope that RootsMagic will eventually support citations for the Primary (Preferred) Name, this pair of scripts provides both conversion and reversion. As of 2015-12-24, RootsMagic is expected to issue an update that will do a similar conversion and an upgrade that will support citations for the Primary (Preferred) Name and revert these conversions. However, it will use a different value in the flag to make the citations reversible than was used in the initial scripts, necessitating these revised versions to be compatible.

Citations, Invisible – Convert to Personals + Flagged.sql rev 2015-12-24 Flags field now set bitwise on 1st bit instead of to 7
Citations, Invisible Revealed – Revert – Bitwise.sql 2015-12-24 Unsets 1st bit of Flags field instead of setting to 0

Caveat! To make it reversible, the converter uses the apparently unused Flags column in the CitationTable. The initial converter dated 2015-12-19 set this value to 7, corresponding to the original OwnerType value for the Citation Table record; the value that RootsMagic will use for this purpose will be the 1st bit set to 1, allowing the Flags field to be used for many bitwise flags. I cannot predict what the consequences might be for those records having a flag value of 7 set by the initial converter. If you used the now-deprecated, initial version of Citations, Invisible – Convert to Personals + Flagged.sql, it would be advisable to run this complementary script to revert them to the primary Name fact: Citations, Invisible Revealed – Revert.sql Then follow up with the revised converter above or wait for the RootsMagic update to do the same thing.

James Clouse posted this video to the RootsMagic Users Facebook Group showing how to use SQLiteSpy to open your database and run the conversion script. Click on the settings and select HD to avoid fuzziness.

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