Sources Sorting

[moytura19]

Hello! Looking for ideas and help. I have just upgraded to Reunion 13. And want a fresh start! My sources are a mess. I have 851 sources. I have 2500 persons in my tree. Most from Ancestry. Some are doubled. All are free form. Now would like to get them sorted out. What should I do? Delete them all and start again? Or go one by one and try to get a system? Thanks in advance.

[eventide]

Not sure exactly what you are trying to do other than remove duplicates, but whatever you do don't delete them!

My sources were a mess too, but I am going through them one by one fixing them and removing duplicates as I go. In order to keep track of which ones I worked on, I saved all my sources as a text file, then brought them into Google Sheets where I mark them off as I go. Plus I keep the old source (in google sheets) and add the new one in case I make a mistake somewhere.

[dwkiefer]

I've had to do that with some sources and I concur with going through them one by one. When you're editing each source you can assign--or reassign--a template to the source and copy parts of your free-form citation into the appropriate template fields. Then you can delete the free-form text when you're satisfied you've got everything you want in the other fields. After you've assigned a new template to a completed source, it will be easy to spot the remaining free-form sources in your source list. That seems much easier than starting from scratch.

[Michael Talibard]

I entirely agree with Dan.

[moytura19]

Thank you everyone for the help.

[Barnbarroch]

Thank you everyone for the help.

I'm afraid there's no easy way for this!

[LindaCK]

I had the same issue- lots of footnotes, etc. etc. from Ancestry. I had 1500+ sources. I spent some time trying to decide how I wanted to structure things, then bit the bullet. I love that Reunion has so much flexibility that you can structure things in any way that you like. I ended up with 72 categories and use "details" at the person level to put in specifics. Some people had a dozen or more sources due to all the stuff Ancestry put in, so it wasn't as bad as I thought. Using the show "unused" sources, then deleting after working on individual people was quite satisfying and a little addicting ! I'm so happy I did it.