Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Ancestor and Descendant Interest (Beginner)

The ancestor and descendant interest option allows you to set a rating for how interested you are in any particular ancestor or descendant.

To use this feature you have to first turn it on. Go to Options > Customize > Data Entry > Options 2.7 Ancestor/Descendant Interest (ff). 

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Notice the (ff). This means this setting is Family File specific and you will have to set it for every file you have, if you have more than one.

You will now see two new options on the Individual's Information screen.

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You can set these numbers from 0-3. These number represent how interested you are in this person's Ancestors and/or Descendants. Even though it is represents this person's ancestors and descendants, those ancestors and descendants will not have their numbers filled in. Why? Because you set them for each person individually to show how interested you are in THEIR ancestors and descendants. 

For my James Simmons I have set his Anc to 3 and his Des to 1. This means that I am VERY interested in his ancestors but not as interested in his descendants. 

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So what will this do for you? This gives you an additional level of search criteria. If you go to Search > Find > Detailed Search you will see that you now have options for the Anc. Interest and the Desc. Interest and you can choose 0-3. 

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Doing searches is more of an intermediate skill but I wanted to at least introduce this. This particular criterion works best (in my opinion) when you couple it with other criteria. For example, I can find all my Simmons relatives that I have a particular interest in. This will significantly reduce the numbers on my Search List considering I have 552 Simmons in the file. You can combine this with any of the different criterion on any of the different search windows and with as many as you need.  Another example, I could do a search for every Simmons, who I have an interest in, that has birth information but does not have death information. 

Searching is one of the most powerful tools in Legacy and this gives you another layer to work with. 

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Copying Info From Websites (Beginner)

We get emails from time to time from users that say their notes have goobledy gook in them.  The first thing we ask is, Did you copy and paste this information from the Internet?

Websites have a lot of embedded coding that you can't see. When you copy from a website you are also copying that coding. 

All of our Notes fields have a button to Strip HTML codes. Depending on the specific Notes field the button can look two different ways:

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This will get rid of any standard HTML language; HOWEVER, websites can also have embedded code for their own purposes that is not HTML so this tool might not clear it all. Also, different web browsers can insert their own code for their own use and some of that can also be picked up. 

The best way to make sure that all coding is removed is to copy and paste your text to Window's Notepad first. Notepad will strip all of the embedded and hidden codes. Now copy and paste from Window's Notepad into the Legacy Notes field. Once your text has been stripped of these codes you can spruce your text up with bold, italics, and underlining if you so desire. You can also Insert "Tables" (Columns) and Tab Spaces. 

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Same Sex Relationships (Beginner)

To enter a same sex relationship you just enter it like you would any other relationship but make sure you have changed the genders to female-female or male-male.  However, there are several other options in Legacy that go along with this that I want to highlight in this post. 

You can change the entire Legacy interface to reflect a more gender-neutral language. This is a GLOBAL change. Go to Options > Customize > View > Option 8.14. If you change this to Gender-Neutral you will see wording changes on the toolbars. For example, if you click the Add tab on the main toolbar/ribbon at the top you will see Add Left Spouse and Add Right Spouse instead of Add Husband and Add Wife. You must restart Legacy before you will see these changes.

You will still see Husband and Wife labels on the Family View. You can change these GLOBALLY by going to Options > Customize > View > Option 8.7. Click the button that says Edit Default Marriage Wording. This options controls both the Family View labels AND Reports. 

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If you would rather change the wording on an individual basis instead of globally open the couple's marriage screen and click the Wording Options tab. This screen is slightly different but again it controls the Family View labels and Reports.

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This is yet another way you can customize Legacy so that your interface looks the way you want and your reports read out the way you prefer.

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

File Maintenance (Beginner)

If you click the File tab on the ribbon at the top of the screen you will see File Maintenance. If you click the down arrow thingie you will see five options. We are going to discuss all five. Normally I would have labeled this article for Intermediate Legacy users but the first file maintenance task is critical for all users.

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Check/Repair

It is VERY important that you do routine check/repairs on your file. The more you work in your file the more often you need to do it. If you do these routine checks Legacy will be able to fix the minor file errors that pop up, but if you don't, you will find things on the error log that you will have to manually clear or worse, Legacy will pop up an error right in the middle of you doing something and then you will be emailing tech support asking how to clear the error. 

While the check/repair is running just leave it alone. Sometimes it can take several minutes to run. If there are errors Legacy will ask you if you want to see the error log. You always want to look at it to see what is there. 

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Always run the Check/Repair twice. Most of the errors you see on the log file are ones that Legacy has already fixed. The next time you do the Check/Repair it should come back clean. If it doesn't, that's when you need to print the log file and address the errors. You will be given RIN and MRIN numbers to find the person(s) with the error(s). After you have addressed them, run the Check/Repair again to make sure it comes back clean. 

I work in my file almost every day. I do a Check/Repair before I backup my file for the day. (I also make sure I have no unlinked media before I back up but that is another article).

List Cleanup

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Most of the List Cleanup is for abandoned information and resolving duplicates which is pretty self explanatory. It is the Keep/Restore Original Values for section that I want to talk about, especially the Event Definitions. If you have created custom event sentences you will need to have this box UNchecked ALWAYS. If you check it, Legacy will give you a stern warning to make sure you know what you are doing. 

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If you go through with this you will lose all of your custom event sentences. If that happens you will need to restore your most current backup to get them back. If you have no idea what I am talking about, please see Custom Event Sentences. 

The other options in this section are not as dramatic. If you have deleted some or all of the defaults that Legacy has in these categories and only kept the ones you actually use (some default and your own custom items) if you check these boxes all of the defaults will reappear but your custom items won't be touched. 

For example, I might have deleted Annulled as a Marriage Status. It is a Legacy default but I have never used it so I deleted it. If I check the box for Marriage Statuses Legacy will add back all of the defaults I deleted including the Annulled status. If you have done a lot of deleting of the defaults you will want to keep these boxes unchecked or you will have to delete them again. The Master Lists have a Purge feature in the Options menu to purge all unused at one time.

Compact Family File

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The easiest way to explain this one is to compare it to a Windows defrag. When working in your file, little data holes (for lack of a better way to explain it) occur when you are adding people, deleting people, and merging people as well as adding/deleting/merging events. When you do a Compact Family File Legacy goes through and lines all the data back up nice and neat. This is normal in any database program. It will compress your file making it smaller and more efficient to run. 

Technically a Check/Repair has the Compact Family File as one of its steps but you can also do it by itself. I like to do a Compact Family File BEFORE I do a Check/Repair so that the Check/Repair runs more efficiently but that's just me.

Set Sorting Order

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Different counties have different ways of sorting lists. In the US we use a simple alphabetical sort but not so in other countries. You can change the sort order here to correspond with the sort order you are used to.

Rebuild Source Citations

This one starts working the second you click it. You don't get an additional dialog box. You will immediately see this:

This is for those users that use the direct sync to FamilySearch. When you create a source citation in Legacy the different parts of the citation are in different fields within the Access database. When you want to transfer a source to FamilySearch, FamilySearch can't pull the different parts together to make the whole citation. There is a special field where Legacy puts the entire citation in a single field and that is where FamilySearch pulls from. When you Rebuild Source Citations Legacy is going through and making sure that the special field has been populated. You will see this same dialog box when you update Legacy. The developers want this routine to run when you update so that it gets done periodically. If you use the FamilySearch interface and you have been adding a lot of citations, it is a good idea to run this from time to time. The more citations you have the longer it takes. The above dialog box is from the sample file. Here is the dialog box from one of my personal files. This will take quite a while to finish. 

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If you would like to know more about how to use the FamilySearch interface, please read FamilySearch Training. 

Keep your file healthy and compacted by using the File Maintenance routines. 

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Options and Toolbars (Beginner)

Here is a quick list of all of the individual posts in the Options series and the Toolbars series.

Customize Legacy
Options: General Settings
Options: Data Entry
Options: Data Format
Options: Data Defaults
Options: Dates
Options: Locations
Options: Sources
Options: View
Options: Colors
Options: Fonts
Options: Launch
Options: Other Settings
Options: Message Boxes

System Toolbar
File Toolbar
Edit Toolbar
Add Toolbar
View Toolbar
Reports Toolbar
Tools Toolbar
Search Toolbar
Internet Toolbar
My Toolbar
Quick Access Toolbar
Help Toolbar
Design Menu
Three Custom Toolbars

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

What's This Icon? (Beginner)

Whenever a Legacy icon is colored in that means that there is data entered for that person in that section. In the below screenshot you can see that I have entered events for Benjamin and his wife Anne because both of their events icons are colored. But why does Anne's icon have a red circle above it and Benjamin's doesn't? 

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The red circle means that Anne has had an event SHARED with her. Benjamin doesn't have this red circle because I have not shared any events with him. It is the RECIPIENT of the shared event that gets the red circle not the person from whom the event was shared. 

This is just another way Legacy gives you a visual clue to what you have entered.

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Customize the Family View (Beginner)

When someone sees one of my screenshots and they notice that my labels on the Family View are different than what they have they want to know how they can change them.  Easy peasy. 

You can see that my labels are Born, Died, Age [at death], Cause of Death and Cemetery. 

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All you have to do is mouse click on one of the labels and then click Customize. The Customize box pops up.  This is where you can tell Legacy what information you want displayed.  Notice that you can display up to five fields.  Also notice the Load and Save buttons which we will get to in just a bit.

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To change one of the fields click the little square to the right that has the … in it. and you will get this:

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You have 99 options to choose from.  You actually have a lot more than that.  Event is only on the list once but if you choose that you will be able to pick any event that you have.  Here is where it gets really cool.  You can save up to 10 different sets of labels!  Depending on what you are researching at the time, you might want other things to display on the Family View.

There are two other fields here that you can edit, the Names to Display and the Short Name. These are the actual field labels you will see on your screen. I could change DthCau to COD if I wanted to. The Short Name is what you will see if you have your screen at half size or you are working in Split Screen where there isn't enough room to display the full label title.

Here I am saving my new set of labels.  I am going to Save it to number 1.  If I want to use one of my custom sets of labels I would only need to click Load (above the save button). I have named this set FSID (FamilySearch ID). 

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Now when I click on the labels I have a quick pick list I can use but I can still go to the customize screen if I prefer and can click Load there. 

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You can see the labels that I have now are Birth, Death, Age, Cemetery, and FSID.

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Here is my "German" set of labels.

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This is just one of many ways you can customize screens to get them they way you want.

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Three Custom Toolbars (Beginner)

If you click Design in the extreme upper right corner of the screen and then choose Toolbars, this is what you will see:

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We have already looked that the Quick Access Toolbar and the My Toolbar in this series of articles covering the Toolbar/Ribbon options. I showed you how to access and edit these but now you have another way to get to the edit screens. These links will take you right to them.

We haven't looked at the Husb/Wife Toolbars yet so that is what we will do now. These are the Husband and Wife Toolbars:

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If you go to Design > Toolbars > Husb/Wife Toolbars it will take you to the edit screen:

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This screen works in the very same way as the My Toolbar and the Quick Access Toolbar. If you want to add an icon to the toolbar simply drag it up into place. If you want to remove one, drag it to an empty space and drop it there. You can rearrange the icons on the toolbar by dragging them into place. The only difference is there are less icons to choose from. These are the icons that pertain to a single individual. 

I hope you enjoyed this series on the different Toolbars. I will also be publishing an article that has links to all of the articles in one place. 

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Design Menu (Beginner)

The Design Menu is at the extreme upper right corner of the screen. There are quite a few customizations here that users can overlook.

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The little arrow looking thing at the left is a shortcut that will minimize (or expand) the main Toolbar/Ribbon. If you minimize it, this will give you more space on the main screen. 

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If you click the word About it will take you to the Legacy Splash Screen.

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The words General, Company, Translations, and Close are all hot links you can click.

If you click the word Design (or the little down arrow thingie to the right of the word Design) you will see this:

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We are going to look at Styles, Font, and Animation today. Toolbars will be next week.

If you select Styles you will see this:

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These are color schemes for the Toolbar/Ribbon. You can use these in conjunction with Options > Change Colors to get a more personalized look. Just play around with it until you like what you see.

You learned about the System Toolbar In Tuesday's Tip - System Toolbar.  On the Styles Menu you will see the word System here. If you click this you can add the System tab to any color scheme!  I happen to prefer the System tab so I have this selected. 

When you click Font this is what you will see: 

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These Font sizes, Normal, Large, Extra Large, only apply to the Toolbar/Ribbon. Be aware that the larger you make the font on the ribbon the less room you will have on the rest of the screen. It is a balance. You can control the screen fonts at Options > Customize > Fonts. 

The Animation option is a simple on or off. You can see that I have it clicked on. 

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If this is on, the items on the main Toolbar/Ribbon will light up (highlight) when you mouse over them. 

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Next time we will look at the Three Custom Toolbars.

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.

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Quick Access Toolbar (Beginner)

The Quick Access Toolbar is my favorite toolbar feature. You can customize it like the My Toolbar. The advantage to the Quick Access Toolbar over the My Toolbar is that it is always visible. The disadvantage is the icons have to be a lot smaller because of space constraints. 

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You edit the Quick Access Toolbar the same way as the My Toolbar. To get to the edit screen, click the little down arrow thingie to the right of the word Design in the extreme upper right corner of the screen, then Toolbars, then Quick Access.

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When you do, you will see a familiar screen.  The edit screen looks the same as the edit screen for the My Toolbar. It works in the very same way. You drag icons from the bottom to the toolbar above. To remove an icon from the toolbar just drag it away from to the toolbar with your mouse to an empty part of the screen and drop it there. You can rearrange the icons by dragging them into place. 

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You can position the Quick Access Toolbar above or below the main toolbar. You can also minimize the main toolbar (ribbon) so that only the Quick Access Toolbar is visible giving you a lot more room on your screen. To see these options, click on the little down arrow thingie at the right of the Quick Access Toolbar. 

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Next time we will take a look at the Design Menu.

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.