The feature most requested by Legacy Family Tree users - Shared Events - will be included in the soon-to-be-released Legacy 8 upgrade.

First of all, if the Legacy term of "event" is new to you, you have been missing out on one of the most important aspects of genealogy research. An event is something that took place in an ancestor's life - like their immigration, a land transaction, being enumerated in the census, being a witness to a marriage. An event is usually associated with a date and a place. Recording these events is crucial to genealogical success because it builds a timeline of the ancestor's life. The timeline displays their migration and shows you where you need to look for their records. Just click on the Chronology View to see the ancestor's timeline. (Click on the image below to see a portion of Asa Brown's Chronology report.)

The timeline is built from the information and events you have recorded. In Legacy 7, much of this comes from the Events/Facts section as shown here:

Compare this with the same screen in Legacy 8:

In red, below, are some of the enhancements:

First is the addition of the Age column - I love it!

Next, the blue arrows in the Event/Fact column indicate that this is an event shared with this person, originating from someone else. In this example, I added the 1800 census event to Nathan Brown, and shared it with everyone else in the household.

Using the new "Share" button prevents me from having to manually add this event to everyone else involved.

Next, the four columns of colorful icons replace the boring S and + symbols of v7. Hovering your cursor over the shared event icon will show you how many people share this event: 

By the way, when you add a new event, it is now automatically sorted! Can I get a hallelujah?!

Now for the practical use of shared events. I'll use the census for the first example. Since I found Asa Brown in the 1850 census, I would add a new Census event to his record as shown below. (Some people call it a Residence event. It doesn't really matter. What matters is adding the event because it shows the place a person lived on a certain date.)

Also in this household were his wife, five children, and one stepson. Prior to Legacy 8, I would 1) click on the small "copy event to clipboard" button, 2) navigate to the next person in the household, 3) create their census event, 4) click the "paste event from clipboard" button, and 5) save their new event. 6) Repeat steps 2-5 for each person in the household. This has worked wonderfully because it adds this event to each person's timeline.

In Legacy 8, just click on the "Share Event" button and select the other people with whom you wish to share the event. The role of "household member" is automatically added to everyone, yet this role can be adjusted if desired.

This new shared event now appears in both the Individual's Information screen AND the Chronology View for each of these people. Simple!

Other uses for shared events would include sharing the "Deed" event with the others mentioned in the deed like the grantor/grantee or even the witness to the deed. These individuals may be family, associates, or neighbors that end up being important to research also. When you click on the Add Person button, you can choose to 1) select a name from the name list or 2) just enter the name of a person.

You would also use shared events with a marriage certificate. The marriage certificate not only provides information about the bride and groom, but also about the wedding's witnesses. Sharing the marriage event is an easy way to link everyone together so their relationships are recorded and not forgotten.

What other ideas do you have? When would you use a shared event?

Sorting of events and children

It gets even better! I mentioned above that events are now automatically sorted in the Individual's Information screen as they are added. But what about all those events and children you have previously entered? With the new "Sort Child, Marriage, and Event Lists" tool, Legacy 8 will look for children, marriages, and events that were entered out-of-order and sort them for you.

Don't worry though if you have children or events without dates that you have manually sorted. We have taken that into consideration and provide you with options to preserve your manually sorting.

So what do you think? Are you excited about the new Shared Events and Sorting features? 

What are the other new features of Legacy 8?

Here are links to the articles I've previously written:

Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed

Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed - Q/A, new Tagging options, and other surprises

Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed - Migration Mapping

Legacy Family Tree 8 Revealed - Instant Duplicate Checking

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.