Ancestry.com built-in source template

#1 · 2022-12-01, 12:18 am

This has got to be a problem that has already been covered in this forum, but I can't find it posted anywhere.

The problem is that when I print a bibliography, Ancestry.com sources print with a leading comma. If I save my report in a text file and do a search/replace I can easily fix this, however it puts my bibliography out of alphabetical order.

Since we can't edit built-in source templates, has anyone come up with a workaround/solution for this?

Uploaded files:

#2 · 2022-12-01, 9:55 am

It is disconcerting that RM Inc continued to create source templates that result in extraneous punctuation when a field is empty, viz. Source Templates: Revision Utilities. Built-in templates can be modified through SQLite but the modification cannot be carried across a GEDCOM transfer. The sentence templates themselves have no effect on TreeShare. So the Ancestry Record Source Templates can have their sentence templates freely modified with effect only on the report products of the database.

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#3 · 2022-12-01, 11:51 am

Thanks for this. I'm also unsure why some of my freeform sources have been converted to Ancestry sources. They were hand-entered by me from sources outside of Ancestry.

#4 · 2022-12-01, 4:54 pm

In the SourceTemplateTable, record #439 is the template for Ancestry.com record sources and the Bibliography sentence is currently:

I'm uncertain that there is anything wrong with it and why you get the result you do. I just ran an experiment with the same collection and the result I get is punctuated correctly.

Uploaded files:

#5 · 2022-12-01, 4:59 pm

And what version of RM are you using? I'm on 8.2.5 and our citation preview panes are different.

#6 · 2022-12-01, 5:59 pm

Aha! You are on RM7 and the Bibliography sentence template was revised|improved for RM8. Here's the RM7 version:

[Author:Reverse]. [Title]. <[PubPlace]|N.p.>: <[Publisher]|n.p.>, <[PubDate]|n.d.>.

If you replace it with this from RM8, the extraneous comma will be gone:

Likewise for the Short Footnote, use the RM8 version in RM7.

#7 · 2022-12-01, 9:15 pm

Quote from jlodge on 2022-12-01, 12:18 am
This has got to be a problem that has already been covered in this forum, but I can't find it posted anywhere.

It was addressed on the page Ancestry TreeShare - Impact that has a link back to the formative discussion in July 2017. It only took four years for the fix to be in a public release. I note that my earlier solution on that page is different from what is in RM8 which looks identical or close to what user Gina had proposed back then.

I suspect the current RM8 Bibliography sentence template still has the same problem when the Author is something like "Ancestry.com and The Church Of Latter Day Saints". It will come out as "Saints, Ancestry... Latter Day".

#8 · 2022-12-01, 9:43 pm

Quote from jlodge on 2022-12-01, 11:51 am
Thanks for this. I'm also unsure why some of my freeform sources have been converted to Ancestry sources. They were hand-entered by me from sources outside of Ancestry.

I suspect that what you mean is that sources using the Free Form template or any RM source template, when uploaded to Ancestry.com and then downloaded to a new RM database end up as using the Ancestry Record Source template. That is because RM has to comply with the Ancestry API spec for transport of citations and it is constrained by the A.com database design and structure to support only one source structure for import. The Ancestry Record Source fields definition is identical or nearly so to the GEDCOM standard with fields such as Title, Author, Publisher, etc. for the Master Source and then Page for the specific citation from that source. Very much modelled on book sources. So RM puts the Footnote sentence with only the Master Source variables into the Title field and all the values from the Source Detail|Citation fields concatenated with semi-colon separators into the Page field.

There's more discussion about this from way back at Source Templates, especially in the PDF linked from the section "A Trio of Templates". While it pre-dates TreeShare, the issue of translating from RM templates to book-style templates is the same. That's why TreeShare brought about the addition of the Ancestry Record Source template.

#9 · 2022-12-01, 11:00 pm

Thanks so much! I will try it asap!