Questionnaires and Interview Reports (Beginner)
In Printing Blank Forms, I showed you how to print blank Individual Reports, Family Group Reports, and Pedigree Chart Reports which will help you gather information from your extended family members. There are two more tools that you can use, the Questionnaire and the Interview Questions Report.
The Questionnaire is very straightforward. Go to Reports > Questionnaire
The beauty of this report are the opening and closing paragraphs. I have found that if I provide the person with some background information about the family and what I am trying to find out it is much more likely that I will get a positive response. Dave Berdan has given you an excellent template to work from. You can easily type in your own information.
The Interview Report is amazing and in my opinion, under utilized. Go to Reports > Other Reports > Interview Questions.
This report is completely customizable. There are three tiers, the main topics, the subtopics, and then the questions.
You drill down to the subtopics and questions by using the plus (+) sign to the left or you can use the Expand Group button at the bottom. You collapse each section by using the minus (-) sign to the left or the Collapse Group button.
You can change the wording of the main topics, subtopics, and questions, you can add your own main topics, subtopics, and questions, and you can delete any of the main topics, subtopics, and questions. To further customize the report, click the Cover Page tab at the top and you can enter all of the particulars. I love this feature because you can now file a hard copy of this report in your paper files which will become an heirloom.
The Interview Report also comes with a built in Permissions page (customizable). Whenever you record information about a living person you must have their permission to use it in an public way.
Before you print, go through and check just the questions you want to include. You can also save multiple sets of questions by clicking the Save Questions button in the lower right hand corner. You call them back up by choosing Load Questions. When you save your questions make sure you title the file in such a way that you know what each set of questions it is.
You can print the report to give to someone to fill out or you can use it as a guide when you are doing an oral interview. When you source this information you can use Legacy's SourceWriter Interview template.
I hope this has given you some ideas of how you can bring life to your family history by gleaning information from your extended family members through personal interviews. Here are two additional articles that will help you write your ancestors' stories.
Find tech tips every day in the Facebook Legacy User Group. The group is free and is available to anyone with a Facebook account.
For video tech tips check out the Legacy Quick Tips page. These short videos will make it easy for you to learn all sort of fun and interesting ways to look at your genealogy research.
Michele Simmons Lewis, CG® is part of the Legacy Family Tree team at MyHeritage. She handles the enhancement suggestions that come in from our users as well as writing for Legacy News. You can usually find her hanging out on the Legacy User Group Facebook page answering questions and posting tips.
It was a bad link which I have fixed 🙂