Bugs & Questions about Smart Copy

I released 1.57.1 which should maintain the name placement when there is a first initial.

Not sure if anyone has tried SmartCopy on "multilingual" profiles from FamilySearch. I noticed that SC only places names under English (default), is that correct?

Correct - if you want to link to an example, I can look at it, but I expect it would be a challenge to implement.

Here's one: http://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-40001/familysearch-fa...

On FamilySearch, the profile is in "Chinese name template", but I'm not sure if MH keeps such information in SmartMatches.

The dates are funny. I suppose MH gives such estimates for the Julian calendar.

Reminder: If SmartCopy 'hangs', CTRL-click on the icon & select the "Inspect Popup" option. The resulting extra window should show if there is an error.

Here is a MH search result that gives an error (never gets to prompting for a Geni profile ID/URL). v1.57.1

http://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-1/myheritage-family-t...

(a semi-limited access page ...)

Hi. I don't have an Ancestry.com account, but I've found some useful information that's publicly available (e.g., http://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/szmuel-borensztein_158610921). Unfortunately, it seems SmartCopy cannot parse it. Would it be possible to develop that functionality?

Private User, thanks for the report. Yes, that should work.. so I'll have to investigate why it's not. I'll notify here when I push an update.

Thanks, Private User! That'd be much appreciated.

They reformatted these pages as well, so I have to rewrite the parser. Sigh

Updated 1.58 - Ancestry formatting changes

That's awesome, Private User, thanks!

Thank you for Smart Copy! It is a huge time saver!

I have noticed a couple things with dates when copying from an ancestry.com tree.

1) It does not like when a date looks like this: apr 27,1914

I think I have seen it drop the date and i feel like i saw it also drop the 1 from the year also

2) it does not like it when a date is formatted with dashes and no spaces... I thought I saved an example of it but I did not... I think it was something like 12-15-1901 perhaps...

John

Hi, John ... next time you encounter one of those, if it is a publicly viewable page, post the URL link to it so Jeff can see what the parser may be doing with it.

As a reminder, you can 'correct' information in the SmartCopy panel before clicking the "Submit" to create/update the Geni profiles.

Thanks John Dale Kessel - I've updated v1.58.1 to properly parse both dates. However, there is a big warning with the second date if a page instead uses the DD-MM-YYYY format instead of what you have here, MM-DD-YYYY. It's rare that I see the dates presented in these formats on a genealogy website as it's easy to confuse the month and day, which leads to bad data being copied. But when SmartCopy sees it, it will default to MM-DD-YYYY unless the first value is greater than 12, which would cause it to switch to DD-MM-YYYY. So users should be very careful and verify when they see dates like this, as SC doesn't have an easy way to tell.

Oh, and the formatting is done per date. So given a scenario of a page that uses DD-MM-YYYY (again, a very rare situation), some of the date formats could be correct and others not as it is evaluated individually for each date as it processes each person. In such non-standard formatting situations, it doesn't catalog all the dates and evaluate them as a whole to determine the best formatting.

Thank you Private User!!

Yes, that makes sense. I can imagine that is complicated when you can't tell the month number from the date. I have seen where someone has something entered in as June 12th and i'm sitting here looking at an actual document that says December 6th :-)

Here is another example of a difficult one in an ancestry.com tree. It's amazing they don't have more controls on the dates when someone enters them in.. Wow! I know you can't win them all sometimes, but this one is:

1 24 1996

Found at http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/63975268/person/46181261112

Thanks John, I've added a space " " as a possible delimiter for the MM-DD-YYYY, DD-MM-YYYY, and YYYY-MM-DD formats in version 1.58.2.

Thanks Private User!

When the 'About' annotation (aka 'footnote') was being discussed, the primary MyHeritage pages of use/interest required a subscription to MH, and that was the only 'link' available to use in the 'annotation'.

Now, however, there are some "free" databases that are referenced through the MH SmartMatch/RecordMatch mechanism, with the two examples being WikiTrees and FamilySearch.org.

Since those MH 'reference' pages contain a link to the original "free" source page, I think it would be very helpful to have that original 'source' link used in the 'annotation'. It's a bit mis-leading to have the text state "FamilySearch" when the FamilySearch link is not used 'behind' it. (Same for WikiTree.)

FindAGrave already uses the 'direct link' (since it is parsed directly from the FindAGrave page anyway!).

Updated 1.58.4 to directly link to FamilySearch and WikiTree. However, this comes at a slight cost. To those with access, the source to MyHeritage is preferable as SC can't directly parse FamilySearch yet. I'm also not sure what the delay is between an index and the original site. I've seen several WikiTree indexes point to a page that no longer exists or is redirected (merged), so it could point to a source that doesn't reflect the information that was copied.

Thanks, Jeff! It also provides a bit of "courtesy" to those "Basic" Geni members who have information updated on a profile of interest to them -- as long as it came from a 'free' original, now they can look at that original page.

Of course, an intermediate 'indexing' page (like the MH pages for FamilySearch) can become 'stale' ... I noted such 'staleness' several times back when FindAGrave *was* indexed by MH (e.g. one of two duplicates "memorials" was removed, but the MH indexing still was hanging around for both).

That the original source no longer reflects the information originally copied is always an issue with any kind of "copy" from a semi-dynamic/changeable source; that's nothing peculiar to SmartCopy. I do think it'll be better pointing back to the 'original' page whenever possible, though.

v1.58.4 -- bit of a bug.

It seems the last page parsed is getting put into the 'annotation' link.

Simple 2-person example:
Geni profile: Mark Ora Linn
MH-FamilySearch page: http://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-40001/familysearch-fa...

Resulting annotation link points to the wife, not the 'focus' profile.

(Haven't checked a more complicated situation yet...)

... yep, 1.58.4 is picking up the link to the last person parsed on the MH page, not the one for the 'source record'. Here is another example:

http://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-40001/familysearch-fa...
... which is placing the FamilySearch link to the record for 'Martha Elizabeth Wood', not 'Isom Clinton Wood'.

Thanks Dan, I've pushed out 1.58.5 to fix that issue. Should be available shortly.

For Geni members that don't have an MH subscription (that is nearly all of us), SmartCopy changes Geni profiles but we don't know what changed or where the changes came from.

It would help if SmartCopy added the tree-name to the display so that it reads 'Updated from MyHeritage Rawleigh Family Tree' rather than just 'Updated from MyHeritage Family Tree'.

The essential matching info is already available to us without a subscription once we know which tree is involved.

I've been thinking that it might be nice for SmartCopy to record the tree name and even user name when copying from an ancestry.com tree as well. I like the link to it, but it's possible that down the road somebody might remove the tree it came from, but still give us a hint of where it came from.

PRIORITY UPDATE - Please update to 1.59 now!

MyHeritage recently changed the way they display their pages for the family members of SmartMatch records. They now always show the Geni profile on the left side of the screen, even if the MyHeritage profile changes focus to a family member (not sure why they did this). In doing so, they broke the way SmartCopy recognizes which Geni profile the MyHeritage profile reflected. SmartCopy thinks the focus is the profile on the left, while you're on a family member instead. Thus, you could copy data to the wrong person!

1.59 fixes this and also offers a new feature - it will list a count of what exists on Geni next to each section as a way to help you compare and know there are profiles on Geni that may be apt for an Update instead of Add. So if 2 siblings exist on Geni, next to the Sibling section, it might say "Geni has 1 m 1 f". Gender is indicated by a color circle.

**** Manual Instructions for forcing SmartCopy to update: Right Click on the SmartCopy icon and select Manage Extensions. Check the box at the top right that says "Developer mode". A button will appear below it "Update extensions now" - click it. ****

Thanks Private User for the update.