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:

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.

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.

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?

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:

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 [email protected].

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.

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.

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)

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.)