Legacy News

You know you are living in the year 2009 when...

I'm not in charge of holiday decorations at my home, but yesterday I thought I'd surprise my wife. I found a 9-foot string of pre-lit garland and I knew just the spot for it. After the cashier scanned the garland, she asked, "would you like to purchase a 2-year warranty?" I declined, but smiled as I thought to myself, "a warranty for garland! Only in the 21st century...."

A few years back my mom forwarded me this email entitled "You know you are living in the year 2003 when..." I thought you'd all enjoy this.

1. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is because they do not have e-mail.
2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
3. Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.
4. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.
5. Every commercial on television has a web site address at the bottom of the screen.
6. You buy a computer and 2 months later it's out of date and sells for half the price you paid.
7. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go get it.
8. Using real money, instead of credit or debit card, to make a purchase would be a hassle and take planning.
9. You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.
10. You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.
11. Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.
12. Your idea of being organized is multiple-colored Post-it notes.
13. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.
14. You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.
15. You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
16. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.
17. You wake up at 2 AM to go to the bathroom and check your E-mail on your way back to bed.
18. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)
19. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.
20. Even worse; you know exactly who you are going to forward this to...

Deadlines for on-time Christmas delivery

Want to make sure your cards and packages arrive by December 25? See our holiday deadlines to see when you need to drop your cheer in the mail.

Important

If you are purchasing Legacy or other products from our online store, please do so at least a few days before the below-published deadlines. One never knows how accurate the deadlines are from the postal service.

Save on shipping!

Whether you purchase one item from us, or, ten, the shipping/handling remains the same - one flat rate. Buy gifts for everyone in the family and save.

$10 off Legacy software

Give the gift of Legacy for the whole family. Until December 31, save $10 on new Legacy 7.0 software purchases. Click here for more details. Or save even more with Legacy 3-packs and 5-packs.

Order online or by telephone

• 1-800-753-3453 (U.S. and Canada)
• 1-623-875-4928

Deadlines

According to the United States Postal Service (as of December 1, 2009), these are the "last mailing dates to arrive by Christmas."

U.S. Destinations

Parcel Post: December 16
Priority: December 21
First-class mail letters/cards: December 21
Express mail service: December 23

International Destinations

Africia

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 18
• Express Mail International: December 12
• Priority Mail International: December 4
• First-class mail: December 4

Asia/Pacific Rim

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 18
• Express Mail International: December 17
• Priority Mail International: Decenber 11
• First-class mail: December 11

Australia/New Zealand

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 18
• Express Mail International: December 17
• Priority Mail International: December 11
• First-class mail: December 11

Canada

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 22
• Express Mail International: December 18
• Priority Mail International: December 14
• First-class mail: December 11

Caribbean

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 21
• Express Mail International: December 17
• Priority Mail International: December 14
• First-class mail: December 11

Central & South America

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 21
• Express Mail International: December 12
• Priority Mail International: December 4
• First-class mail: December 4

Mexico

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 22
• Express Mail International: December 17
• Priority Mail International: December 11
• First-class mail: December 11

Europe

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 21
• Express Mail International: December 17
• Priority Mail International: December 14
• First-class mail: December 11

Middle East

• Global Express Guaranteed: December 18
• Express Mail International: December 17
• Priority Mail International: December 14
• First-class mail: December 11

Huge holiday savings from Legacy Family Tree

Just in time for the holidays - all Legacy Family Tree 7.0 software is $10 off until December 31, 2009.

Aren't the holidays great? I really like giving fun gifts to loved ones. We appreciate all of our Legacy users so much and we thank each of you for all of your support over the years. We would like to offer each of you a gift that we think your family and friends will really enjoy.

Through December 31st, we are offering four great ways to save:

1. Save $10 off any new Legacy 7.0 software purchase for yourself.
2. Save $10 off any new Legacy 7.0 software purchase for friends and family. There is no limit to the number of Legacys you can buy at this discount price.
3. Legacy 3-packs. Save even more when purchasing three at a time.
4. Legacy 5-packs. The best value.

Click here to purchase or call 1-800-753-3453.

Buy as many shippable products at the same time, and shipping never goes up - one flat rate!

Legacy 3-packs and 5-packs
Give the gift of Legacy to the whole family with discounted 3-pack and 5-pack pricing. These bundles are brand new and save you even more money when purchasing multiple copies of Legacy.

Click here to browse the new 3-packs and 5-packs

Also save on Legacy add-ons, videos, and books
Nearly every Legacy add-on, training video set, and how-to book has been discounted for this holiday sale, including Paul Larsen's popular book, Crash Course in Family History.

Browse add-on software

Browse training videos

Browse books & software

Happy holidays to everyone!

How to create a 2010 birthday / anniversary calendar using Legacy Family Tree

With the new year approaching, why not resolve to be a better relative by remembering family birthdays and anniversaries? Two features of Legacy Family Tree makes this easy to do:

• Legacy's birthday and anniversary reminders described here.
• Legacy's Calendar Creator.

Legacy can create a birthday calendar, an anniversary calendar, or a combination of the two. There are options to include a cover picture, picture pages above each calendar month, and complete control over color, layout, shadows, fonts, page size, and more. The calendars can be blank or include the birthdates and anniversaries of the people already entered in your family file.

That's right! Because the information (birthdays and anniversaries) is already in your Legacy family file, Legacy will automatically add this to the calendar pages. With the who to include options, you can customize the calendar so only certain family lines are included. You even have the option to skip the anniversaries of divorced couples.

Get Started

To begin, make sure that you have installed Legacy Family Tree Deluxe Edition available here. Then follow these steps:

1. With Legacy open, click on the Reports icon in the main toolbar.
2. Click on the Books/Other tab, and click on the Calendar Creator button.
3. Using the options on the six tabs, customize the calendar to your preferences.
4. Print, and enjoy being the person in your family that never misses a birthday or anniversary!

Click on the picture below for an example:

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because of the three Fs: family, food, and football. These past couple of years I've been able to add one more "F" to the list - family history.

A few years ago I tried explaining to my children how their mother (my wife) and I are related because we both descend through Stephen Hopkins who sailed on the Mayflower. I'm not sure they quite understand how that makes my wife and I 13th cousins. However, one Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, we were reading a children's book, The Thanksgiving Story by Alice Dalgliesh, which recounted the story of Stephen Hopkins' family's trip to America aboard the Mayflower. I was stunned when my then-4-year-old said "Daddy, Stephen Hopkins is our ancestor!" Every Thanksgiving we now read The Thanksgiving Story.

We'd like to wish all of our Legacy Family Tree users a happy Thanksgiving. We're going to take a couple of days off and hope to enjoy family, food, football, and family history.

Forming a Legacy user group in Austin, Texas

If you live in the Austin, Texas area and are interested in participating in a new Legacy user group, please write to Roberta Jenkins. Roberta is one of our fantastic Legacy users who joined us on the 2008 Legacy Genealogy Cruise to Europe, and is trying to organize a group.

Legacy User Groups are held around the world. Some groups meet monthly, others meet quarterly. To see if there is a group in your area, visit our user group page at http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/UsersGroups.asp. Although we do not sponsor or direct user group meetings, we will try to help interested persons make contact with each other who may want to form a group. Send us an email if you want more information.

We also make presentations to genealogy societies. This weekend we spoke to a great group in Fresno, California. If your society is looking for a special 1/2 or full-day seminar on genealogy technology and/or Legacy, send us an email.

Life without email

What would your life be like without email? Would anything change? Would you have more time for other things? I've often wondered how I would manage without email. I must admit, I check it dozens of times a day. Ten years ago I made the ultimate mistake by checking it one last time while my wife was in the car waiting to drive to the hospital for the birth of our first child. I shouldn't have told her. :)

This past week at Millennia we have actually experienced what it is like without email. I do not know the details, but since last Thursday we have not been able to receive your messages. If you have emailed any of us at Customer Support, Support, or any of us personally at Millennia, we have not responded to you because we have not received any emails. Obviously it is not good for a company like ours to be without the normal methods of communication with our customers, and we apologize for this inconvenience. Our guys have been working around the clock to get this resolved, so hopefully we'll be back online soon. Feel free to give us a call (800-753-3453 for sales or 425-788-0932 for technical support).

After the initial shock of being email-less, and staring at my dual monitors wondering what I should do next, I've actually got quite a bit of work done.

Now what would I do if my personal email account went down? Write a letter...on paper...with a pencil...find a stamp...and mail it?

How to best prepare for Legacy 7.5 and the FamilySearch interface - Post #2

This article is the second in a series of articles which will help you prepare your family file for better use with the upcoming Legacy 7.5 and its interface with FamilySearch. Even if you do not plan on synchronizing your data with FamilySearch, these articles will provide valuable insights on cleaning up and standardizing your data. Click here for the first article.

Potential Problems tool.

In our first article we stated "before interfacing with FamilySearch's new Family Tree system, we should all take a closer look at our data." If your data has problems similar to the cartoon's, and you publish this data online, the data online now has these same problems. So before you publish your data anywhere, use Legacy's Potential Problems tool. Using this tool, Legacy runs through your family file and checks the information for some common and sometimes unnoticed discrepancies.

In Legacy, the Potential Problems tool is located by going to:

Tools > Potential Problems.

Select which records to check

The first time you use the Potential Problems tool, you should have it check all the records in the family file. To do this, make sure that on the Records tab, the first option is selected:

Normal check of all records.

Before clicking on the Create Problems List button in the upper right, look at the Warnings, Problems, Standardization, and LDS (if LDS options are turned on) tabs. Each tab shows you which potential problems Legacy will look at. Here's what the Warnings tab looks like (click on image to enlarge):

 
Notice that each option is selectable, in other words, if you only want to check your family file for persons who were buried 30 days after their death, select that option, and turn off all the other checkmarks. You can also adjust the values. For example, by default Legacy will warn you if a child was born when the parents were less than 13 years old. You can change this to 10 years old or whatever value makes sense for you.

Here's the Problems tab:

 

Here's the Standardization tab:

 

And here's the LDS tab:

 

Now click on the Create Problems List button (no this will not "create" problems, it will create the list of problems).

The image below shows a list of potential problems. The first problem is that Kenneth Brown's birth date is more than 20 years after the marriage date of the parents. Although not the norm, this may very well be true for this child. If so, just click on the Mark as Not a Problem button, and this potential problem will not show up again. But it may be worth looking at, so using the Edit buttons on the right you can investigate further.

 
Another problem listed is the Nathaniel Clark's children are not sorted in chronological order. This may not seem like a big problem, but clicking on the Edit Children button showed this:

• Asa Clark, born 12 Feb 1742
• Abel Clark, born 24 Jan 1742
• Caleb Clark, born 26 Nov 1744
• ...8 more children

This certainly looks like a potential problem, and before sharing this data with FamilySearch or anywhere else, you should reinvestigate this family.

Narrow your focus

My personal database has information on lots of people that are not closely related to me (8th cousins, 4 times removed, etc.). To begin, I want to focus my clean-up efforts on my direct line.

From the Records tab, I can limit the records being checked to those with a certain "Tag" number. For example, I can mark everyone on my direct line with a tag value of 1. Then I can have the Potential Problems tool only report problems of people on my direct line. For step-by-step instructions on how to use tagging, watch this video.

You're now closer to being ready to successfully work with Legacy 7.5 and the new FamilySearch system. Hopefully the potential problems report doesn't give you too many surprises. But if it does, you'll be better prepared to share your information with others.

 

Legacy Genealogy Cruise 2010 - Australia/New Zealand - Nov 8-21

The 7th annual Legacy Genealogy Cruise, held November 8-21, 2010, starts and ends in Sydney, Australia and visits the following New Zealand ports: Fjordland National Park, Dunedin (Port Chalmers), Christchurch (Lyttelton), Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, and Bay of Islands. We will sail on Princess Cruises Sun Princess ship.

Experience Australia and New Zealand the way you've always dreamed.

Australia and New Zealand provide some of the most unique and beautiful landscapes in the world. Spotlight the bustling metropolises of Sydney and Auckland, plus the incredible wildlife on land and at sea, and you have all the elements for a truly memorable vacation. From the sophistication of the Opera House and the world-class wineries, to the rugged individualism of the Outback and its inhabitants, Australia and New Zealand possess a wonderful diversity of sights, activities and cultures. Few travel experiences can rival the excitement of sailing into the glistening harbors of Sydney and Auckland, as well as inspiring attractions, such as scenic Fjordland National Park, just to name a few.

Genealogy Classes At Sea

On the days we are at sea attend the Legacy Family Tree genealogy classes and learn the real secrets to becoming an expert with Legacy and improving the way you do your research. Go home with the knowledge and tools you need to be more successful than you ever thought possible. You will be learning directly from the experts. Last year's classes were recorded for each of the students so they could replay them at home.

The Ship

Our ship, the Sun Princess, has more than 400 balcony staterooms, so you can wake up to your own exclusive vista. Take a dip in one of three spacious pools or spend your evening at one of the show lounges with unique performances each night. Dining options are also plentiful, including two formal dining rooms, the Sterling Steakhouse and the 24-hour Horizon Court. And don't miss the Lotus Spa for some pampering.

Reservations or Questions

Prices begin at US $1595 per person, double occupancy. The price includes:

• genealogy classes
• shipboard accommodations
• ocean transportation
• meals
• some beverages
• most onboard entertainment

Port charges, taxes, gratuities, airfare and optional tours are extra.

Click here to securely book your cruise online.

To reserve a cabin, or ask questions, contact our travel agency, AA Travel Time at 888-505-6997 or send an email to book@aatraveltime.com.

More Information

For class descriptions, frequently asked questions, descriptions of the places we'll visit, or pictures of our past cruises, visit http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/CruiseInfo_2010.asp.

Special Sale: $20 off on Legacy Add-On "Heritage Collector Suite"

Heritage Collector Suite is the Legacy Add-On software which organizes your digital photos, creates narrated slide-shows, publishes family photo books, and much more. For a limited time, save $20 on your purchase of Heritage Collector Suite.

Plus, Bonus Software Included

For the first time ever, the publisher of Heritage Collector Suite has authorized us to include all of the following add-on software at no additional charge:

• Digital Family History Guidebook (over 200 pages, PDF) ($19.95 value)
• Easy Scanning Interactive Tutorial ($14.95 value)
• Storybook module ($9.95 value)
• Heritage Collector Maps (GPS module) ($9.95 value)
• Using Sound Interactive Tutorial ($9.95 value)

That's $64.75 of free software when you purchase Heritage Collector Suite today!

For more information, or to purchase, click the Buy Now button below.

Standardization of Locations - a follow-up

This is a quick follow-up on last week's Location Standardization article which discussed the need to standardize your locations in Legacy.

While testing the new FamilySearch feature in the forthcoming Legacy 7.5, I randomly picked an ancestor, Hannah Hall, to see if the FamilySearch database had any more information than I had. It sure does. In the image below, the information I have about Hannah is in the "My Legacy Person" section. The information from FamilySearch is in the "FamilySearch Person" section.

FamilySearch has 41 different opinions of when/where Hannah was born. Some have sources. Some do not. That's just the nature of published information. These opinions were published by various researchers over the years. Most of the opinions are identical except for the spelling of the location. In this case, Taunton has 30 different spelling variations. Some are abbreviated. Some are misspelled. Some include the name of the country at the end. I suspect that most of this information was published to earlier FamilySearch databases, before the Standard Finder was implemented.

If, decades ago, when we started doing data entry of our locations, we had a standardization tool that everyone in the world had access to, we probably would not see many people with 30 spelling variations of the same place. And while the new Standard Finder, in its infancy, still has its limitations, it is laying the foundation for us to be more consistent in our data entry efforts.

You can begin now by cleaning up your own Master Location List. Watch this video for step-by-step instructions.

(Click on image to enlarge)

What Happens When Cousins Marry?

Question from Earle:

I, like many (I assume), have ancestors who married first or second cousins. This causes havoc when trying to create reports because the same people show up in different lines creating an endless loop. Is there a simple solution?

Our answer:

Earle, I actually think you're the only one with this situation....Kidding....Sorry about that....

You're right, when cousins marry, and you're looking at a their child's pedigree, the same ancestors will appear in different parts of the chart. UNLESS, you turn on the "Don't Repeat Duplicate Lines" option.

Look at the pedigree chart below. The starting person, Jonathan Smith, was the child of two first cousins who married each other. Jonathan's parents had the same grandparents. The grandparents are highlighted in red. But take a closer look at Gertrude's grandparents. Below their names is the phrase "Duplicate line. See Chart 1, Pos 8/9)". Because I've turned on the "Don't Repeat Duplicate Lines", the pedigree chart will only follow the grandparents' line once.

To turn on this option, in the Pedigree Chart's Report Options, click on the Format tab and select "Don't Repeate Duplicate Lines".

(Click on the picture to enlarge.)

How to best prepare for Legacy 7.5 and the FamilySearch interface - Post #1

We have previously announced that we are getting ready to release Legacy 7.5 - a free update which will add features to interface with the new FamilySearch Family Tree system. You can read all about it here. I'm most excited about the ability to be notified when anything new is found about an ancestor - without me even visiting the website.

This article is the first in a series of articles which will help you prepare your family file for better use with the upcoming Legacy 7.5 and its interface with FamilySearch. Even if you do not plan on synchronizing your data with FamilySearch, these articles will provide valuable insights on cleaning up and standardizing your data.

Important Principle. Researchers should be careful when publishing/sharing information from their family file with FamilySearch, or with any online database. If the information in your family file has errors, duplicate information, or inconsistent data, when that information is published/shared online, the online version will contain those same errors, duplicate information, and inconsistent data. A casual commitment to your personal data entry standards often results in negative unforeseen consequences, especially when publishing your data online.

For this reason, before interfacing with FamilySearch's new Family Tree system, we should all take a closer look at our data.

Tip #1 - Consistency in your locations

Take a look at your Master Location List in Legacy (View > Master Lists > Location). Does it contain more than one variation of the spelling of a place name? For example, in Legacy's sample family file, we intentionally spelled Minneapolis with five different variations to help you see a potential problem:

• Minn., Henn., MN, USA
• Minneapolis, Henn., MN, USA
• Minneapolis, Hennepin County, MN, USA
• Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota
• Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota, USA

Publishing the inconsistent locations may eventually result in you/others not successfully finding what you are looking for because what you are searching for, and what is in the database are two different variations of the same place.

FamilySearch's new Standard Finder, which Legacy 7.5 will utilize, helps you achieve standardization in the way you spell your locations. Its goal is to help achieve consistency in how everyone records their locations. It is not a perfect system yet. For example, we know that correct data entry standards suggest to record the place as it existed at the time of the event. Standard Finder does not yet do a great job with correctly interpreting historical locations. But it has a great start.

Assignment #1 - standardize your locations

Clean up the duplicates and variations of your place names in your Master Location List. Legacy Family Tree makes this simple to do. We've created a video for you to see the step-by-step instructions on how to do this. Watch the video by clicking here.

Assignment #2 - clean up your country/county names

If these locations are not immediately obvious to you:

• Victoria, BC
• Carrick, LDY
• Aberdeen, SCT
• Paris, Bear Lake, ID

then the researcher has not followed the golden rule of data entry:

Enter your locations so that there will be no misunderstanding by other researchers as to the location you are trying to express.

Legacy Family Tree's Expand/Contract Location Parts tool makes it easy to correct common abbreviations, and for the United States, to add the country name to the end of its locations where it is missing. This tool is found by navigating to:

View > Master Lists > Location > Options > Expand/Contract Location Parts.

In the Parts to Work On section, place checkmarks next to the desired countries to "unabbreviate" the various country and county names.

For United States researchers, use the options in the USA Country Name section. To prepare for full compatibility with FamilySearch, select the Add ", United States" option. This will add this country name to the end of all U.S. locations. To clarify, it will not add "United States" to the end of Bristol, Gloucester, England. If you previously typed "USA" instead of "United States" this option will change "USA" to "United States". Now click the Continue button, and Legacy will update your list.

You're now closer to being ready to successfully work with Legacy 7.5. When working with the FamilySearch interface tools, you will no longer have to spend time "resolving" your place names to match the Standard Finder's version. Cleaning up your locations is just the first suggestion in your preparation. Stay tuned....

Legacy seminar in Fresno, California - November 21, 2009

If you're in the Fresno, California area on November 21, 2009, we invite you to a Genealogy Technology seminar featuring Legacy Family Tree's Geoff Rasmussen.

Hosted by the Fresno County Genealogical Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution, the full-day seminar will have classes about the latest in genealogy technology, including instruction on the use of genealogy's best software (I just had to throw that in!) Legacy Family Tree.

Topics include some of Geoff's most popular classes - each class comes with detailed handouts:

• Genealogist's Guide to Working with Digital Images
• Timelines & Chronologies: Secrets of Genealogical Success
• Organizing, Planning, and Sharing with Legacy Family Tree
• Sharing Genealogy Electronically: Publishing to CD/DVD, the Internet, email and more
• Market Your Ancestors Using Message Boards, Mailing Lists, Blogs and more

The seminar is held at the Holiday Inn Fresno Downtown at 1055 Van Ness Avenue. Pre-registration is $20. Click here for the registration form. Registration at the door is $25. For more information, please contact Corky Peterson at 559-322-1743 or via email.

We'll also have great door prizes and special seminar pricing on Legacy and other genealogy products. Hope to see you there.

How my Windows 7 installation went

As you know, I've been pretty excited to install Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 7. It was released today. Early this morning I checked out different software store's websites to see if they had any great specials. To my surprise, many of the stores said the software was already out of stock. I quickly got in my car and headed for the stores.

Well, all of the stores I tried didn't open for another 1 1/2 hours. I guess stores aren't usually open at 6:30am, but I thought I might get lucky. When I returned home, I did one final inventory of my software and files on my Windows XP computer, just to make sure that I had backed everything up properly.

By 8:20am, I was back at the mall where I easily located a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate edition. No lines. No hassle. No problem.

At 8:52am I inserted the Windows 7 CD. The computer restarted a few times, asked me a few questions (like what is my time zone, etc.), and by 10:02 it had restarted for the final time and was ready to use.

The hardest part of the entire process was locating my Windows 7 product key. I finally found it after removing all the literature in the CD case. It was glued to the back of the inside cover.

First impressions

So far so good....I was actually quite impressed that Windows detected that I had two monitors hooked up. I didn't have to install the video card drivers like I usually do. The interface is clean and modern. Some will say it looks a lot more like a Mac now. I was also impressed that it didn't come with a bunch of "bloat-ware", or pre-installed software that I usually just go into the Control Panel and remove before I do anything else.

So what's next?

The first thing I did was install my anti-virus software - don't ever "leave home" / use your computer without it.

The next thing I did was write this article. :)

The next thing I will do is reinstall Legacy 7.0, my email/calendar software, and my photo organizer/editor.

Since most of my documents (pictures, letters, etc.) are on my second hard drive, I won't need to spend any additional time restoring them. I'm glad I have that second hard drive - sure saved me a lot of time.

I'd better be going now. I've got to get things back to normal as soon as I can so I can get back to finding more ancestors. I'm sure you understand. :)

What are your impressions?

Let us and others know how it went for you by commenting below.