Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed - Instant Duplicate Checking
July 08, 2013
Next up in our Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed series is the revealing of the brand new Instant Duplicate Checking feature! Now, when you are adding new individuals, Legacy can instantly check to see if perhaps they are already in your family file, helping you avoid inadvertantly adding duplicates.
In the early, early years of my genealogy research I added Stephen Hopkins to my Legacy family file. Years later, while adding my wife's ancestors to my file, once again, I added Stephen Hopkins to my file. It wasn't until I used Legacy's Merge/Find Duplicates tool that I noticed Stephen was in my file twice. When I merged the two, I noticed for the first time that both my wife and I shared Stephen as an ancestor. We turned out to be 13th cousins because of it! Now when we need an excuse for why our children are the way they are, we blame it on Stephen.
Legacy 8's brand new Instant Duplicate Checker will now catch any possible duplicate data entry like this. As an example, I just tried adding another Stephen Hopkins to my file and Legacy displayed this screen:
Terrific, isn't it!?! Of course, this new feature is optional, but why would you ever turn it off? Its settings can be adjusted via the new QuickDup Options.
So what do you think? Exciting or just another article?
What are the other new features of Legacy 8?
Here are links to the articles I've previously written:
Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed - Q/A, new Tagging options, and other surprises
Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed - Migration Mapping
When will Legacy 8 be released?
There's still more than one truthful answer to this:
- I'm not really sure, but probably before the end of the year, and hopefully way before then
- When it has been thoroughly tested by our development team and beta testers
But if you are considering downloading either the free or deluxe editions of Legacy, don't wait! Any purchases of Legacy 7.5 from May 8, 2013 forward will receive the new Legacy 8 at no charge. And as always, anyone who has purchased Legacy Deluxe previously will qualify for special discounted upgrade pricing. Get started today - you won't have to relearn everything when Legacy 8 is ready, but you'll get some really nice new features when it is.
Posted by Geoff Rasmussen in Legacy - New in 8, Legacy Tips | Permalink
|
Comments (31)
This too was on my wish list!
Posted by: Michele Simmons Lewis | July 08, 2013 at 08:57 AM
This feature will be awesome!
Thanks!
Posted by: Shelby Jean Hobbs | July 08, 2013 at 09:31 AM
Excellent - as more names get added this will be a beneficial tool!
Posted by: Jim Williamson | July 08, 2013 at 09:31 AM
I think this is a good feature, but I would hope it comes with some added sophistication to the algorithm for nominating potential duplicates. (See LUG discussion on 24 April of this year for examples.)
Posted by: Ward Walker | July 08, 2013 at 09:47 AM
Wonderful to have Instant Duplicator Checking in Legacy, I've missed it from programs I've used in the past.
Posted by: Mary Young | July 08, 2013 at 09:48 AM
This is a great feature. If I remember correctly didn't PAF used to do this? Regardless it will be a big help instead of having to run Merge/Find duplicates. Looking forward to getting the new Legacy 8!!!
Posted by: Barbara Streeton | July 08, 2013 at 09:50 AM
Fantastic feature!! I have 55,000 names in my database and frequently run across the same person linking two families together.
Posted by: Brent Redmond | July 08, 2013 at 09:52 AM
I recently did a MERGE and of 10,000 ancestors found 3,000 duplicates, triplicates, and even more. This will be a great time saver as I am adding 200 or more ancestors a week to my mighty Legacy database! Legacy and FamilySearch are so powerful that I can usually do that in two days!
Posted by: Dr. Walt | July 08, 2013 at 10:03 AM
What will be to cost for us who already have 7.5?
Posted by: Glenda Burch | July 08, 2013 at 10:16 AM
Very pleased with the duplicate checking feature. I've had duplicates many times.
Posted by: Fern Deatherage | July 08, 2013 at 10:49 AM
In conjunction with this feature, it seems to me that on another upgrade you sent out a list of things to do before upgrading to clean up the database (like check for duplicates). Is this something you might consider doing again just as a reminder to those of us who are memory challenged?
Posted by: Andi Durbin | July 08, 2013 at 10:57 AM
Will the duplicate checker consider dates and not just names? My family lines all have multiple individuals with the same first name , and sometimes their spouses even have the same first name .
Posted by: Kristin | July 08, 2013 at 11:38 AM
Fantastic - that would help enormously.... big smiles!
Posted by: Jemima Buoy | July 08, 2013 at 11:46 AM
OK, that sold me - I will definitely be upgrading.
Posted by: Myrna Jorgensen | July 08, 2013 at 12:02 PM
Ward - yes, it comes with options on how to handle the duplicate checking, similar to the merging options.
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 08, 2013 at 12:03 PM
Glenda, although I'm not yet aware of the upgrade pricing, current upgrade pricing (from any version of Legacy to Legacy 7) is listed in our store at http://www.legacyfamilytreestore.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=2
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 08, 2013 at 12:06 PM
Andi - I think the article to which you refer is at http://tinyurl.com/mxcjgbx
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 08, 2013 at 12:16 PM
Kristin - yes, it also checks for dates. The default setting is that the dates should be within 180 days of each other. This can be adjusted to whatever you want.
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 08, 2013 at 12:18 PM
Will it do anything for duplicates that might already be in your file?
Posted by: Melanie Armstrong | July 08, 2013 at 01:18 PM
It looks like an improvement over the prior duplicate feature, primarily because it alerts while the new record is being created. However, the thing I've discovered is the variations in naming of individuals in various sources and there's litle that can be done to catch that, aside from the live human analyzing the related ancestry of each individual and related data. The value will be in catching the obvious duplicate prior to the records actual creation, which will be helpful.
Posted by: Donald Wang | July 08, 2013 at 01:48 PM
Melanie - it won't do anything more for the existing duplicates. You can still use the Merge tool to handle those situations.
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 08, 2013 at 02:01 PM
I'm so excited. How am I gonna wait until it comes out. Congrats to everybody working on Legacy 8!
Posted by: Pat Bean | July 08, 2013 at 02:27 PM
This sounds interesting. I wonder if it will pick up a couple of ancestors who turned out to be brothers but because their parents did not marry until after the birth of one, they had different surnames! This has taken me years to work out.
Posted by: M Wilson | July 08, 2013 at 03:52 PM
The duplicate checker alone will be worth the upgrade. I have JOHNSONS, HARRISONS, and GRAVES families that I research. There were a lot of marriages between cousins and have inadvertently duplicated individuals in working on these lines. Look forward to Legacy 8 release!
Posted by: J. Bales | July 08, 2013 at 04:36 PM
Another wonderful new feature.
Now I can only hope that there will be one more where I can put a note directly against the AKA as to where I found the alternative rather than trying to have to go back to General Notes - pretty please!
Posted by: Marion Wimsett | July 08, 2013 at 06:26 PM
I could have used this feature before I started on one of my families recently where I discovered over 60 men.
Not only did they all have the same surname, they also had the same forename of John.
This new feature would have been a blessing.
Posted by: Geoff Masters | July 08, 2013 at 07:14 PM
I love this!!!! If the wonderful people at Legacy can do this, why oh why can't ancestry? It's a real bummer, finding out you have entered one name 4 times! But Legacy also connects people to others, that we enter,and the tree goes round and round. I think big ancestry needs to take some lessons from Legacy! Thank you for the great program I suggest to all my friends, who are just beginning this wonderful adventure!
Posted by: Cindy Brewer Dooley | July 08, 2013 at 10:58 PM
Geoff;
Will the duplicate checker work when importing another database into an existing one?
Posted by: Jack Landers | July 22, 2013 at 01:33 PM
Jack - the duplicate checker works as you add new people. But you can still use Legacy's Merge tool to have it find all possible duplicates throughout the file.
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 22, 2013 at 04:51 PM
Will it be possible to see/print possible duplicates and do a manual merge rather than a wholesale merge? Seem like that was possible in PAF years ago.
Posted by: R Bruck | July 25, 2013 at 12:43 PM
R Bruck - yes, this is possible. Just go to Merge and select either the manual merge or the find duplicates option. There's a print button under the find duplicates option to see the list of possible duplicates throughout the database.
Posted by: Geoff Rasmussen | July 25, 2013 at 12:48 PM