Cemetery Competition - Category Question for New Profiles

Question

I just decided to test my gedcom creation tool as a way to semi-automate creation of profiles from the tables of data on a cemetery page.

One of the things I wanted it to do was to add the [[Category:CemeteryName, City, State]] tag in the Biography but I cannot make the data import correctly when it includes commas.  The tool can accept and parse csv file imports, therefore when it finds a comma, it interprets that as a field marker instead of as text.

The best I can do is to use a different symbol - for example semi-colon - instead of comma and then all the new profiles would have to be manually edited to change the semi-colons (or whatever someone chooses to use) to commas in all the profiles that were created after the gedcom is imported.

Another question is about profile manager for all the new profiles that will be created - I don't want to become their profile manager!  Does the cemetery project have some preference for who is willing to be profile manager of these or do I just have to orphan them all after making sure the gedcom came in cleanly and the correct category is in the profile?

NOTE - I am about to upload the gedcom sample I tried - it is for Dunn Valley Cemetery, McKean, Pennsylvania.  Some of the records already had profiles - I made a gedcom containing all the ones who do not already have WikiTree ID's.  Stay tuned - I'll update the gedcom import process here as it occurs.

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Comments

UPDATE 1 - Upload is complete for file named DunnValleyCemetery.ged - now waiting for GEDMatches Report

By the way, if anyone wants to see the gedcom file created by the tool, let me know and I'll email it to you.

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UPDATE 2 - GEDMatch is complete and I checked it.  Out of 226 records in the gedcom file, 15 of them have possible matches listed.  I looked at one of them and it is the same person.  This means that on the cemetery page (where I copied the table to start with) some of the people who do NOT have WikiTree ID links actually do already have profiles but were not linked to them.

Another problem I saw in the only one I looked at is that the death date in my gedcom file is wrong by 100 years!  This is the result of the dates having been formatted inconsistently (and sometimes incorrectly) in the table on the cemetery page.  I had to do a lot of changing to the date formats.  Some were dd-mmm-yy and when I made global changes in my Excel file to change dates to 3 fields - 1 each for month, day, and year - when I saw 2 digit years I changed them to "19" plus the year value.  The one I looked at died in 2000 but my gedcom has death year as 1900, which is before the person was born.

I am going to skip all the duplicates without looking further, but expect that some years in the new profiles that will be created are going to be 100 years wrong on birth and/or death dates.

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UPDATE 2a - I have done several screen captures of the GEDMatch screen in order to show all records that can be scrolled on it, then merged them into one graphic file.  I have uploaded that graphic to:

http://www.wikitree.com/photo.php/4/41/GraphicFileStorage-76.jpg

in case anyone wants to see the list of names and the matches that were found.

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UPDATE 3 - Import is complete.  No warning messages were generated.  I will now temporarily paste the list of new names/WikiTree ID's at the bottom of the Dunn Valley Cemetery page to make it easier to do the following work that is needed:

1. Open each new profile and edit it.  Change the semi-colons to commas in the Category link (this can be copied in one place, then pasted in each profile to make it easier).
    
2. Make whatever changes are needed  in the biography/sources.
   
   NOTE:  Although the gedcom import tool has a field for sources, I did not include anything there - if I had known what to put there (perhaps a reference to the cemetery page?) that would have made cleanup easier.
   
    
3. Finally, edit the cemetery page and replace the names in the table with the links to the new profiles.
    
4. One last thing - remove anything remaining in the temporarily pasted stuff from the cemetery page.

I will put the temporary list of names/links on the cemetary page and leave it for whoever wants to get some easy points for the cemetery contest - just do the cleanup outlined above and then claim credit for having added the new profiles.  There are over 200 of them up for grabs - have at it everyone!

If anyone wants to use the gedcom import tool on other cemeteries, just let me know and I'll set up an account for you - the tool is at:  http://www.gcube.us/gedcom and if you want to explore and/or play with it to see what it's all about, you can use the generic user account I made for that purpose - user name is:  team   and password is:   wikitree

 

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UPDATE 3 CORRECTION - I was not able to put the temporary list on the cemetery page because that page has green privacy.  Instead, I put the list on the Category page for the Dunn Valley Cemetery, McKean, Pennsylvania.

 

Answer 1

Hi Gaile,

Thanks for the detailed messages about how your tool works.  Could you set up an account for me?  I'd like to try it on a few entries rather than on an entire list.

I've been thinking about the [[Category:CemeteryName, City, State]] tag issue you discussed.  I understand why entering commas won't work, but is it necessary to enter semicolons or other symbols?  Since this tag will require editing after import anyway, why not just omit the commas rather than replacing them with something else?

Comments

Sure, Star - just send me a private message with the user name and password you want for the tool.

Of course, you're right about the category comma problem - you can use anything you want - including nothing.

Have you taken a look at any of the profiles that were created by my experimental upload?  The word "notes" appears in the bios in a few places, where it is in the gedcom file ONLY so that the import process can interpret it.  Also, the import process seems determined to add the generic statements, no matter what data is in the gedcom.  I just want to be sure you'll know what to expect when you use it.  I have a question out in the wt_apps group and hope to get an answer about whether there is any way WikiTree will be able to import the Bio data cleaner.