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 vs. Sharing Events (Intermediate)

In the last two weeks you learned How to Copy an Event and How to Share an Event. So how do you know which one to use?

Part of it is just personal preference. The biggest deciding factor is how you want things to read out in reports. I suggest you try it both ways. If you copy and paste an event it will look exactly the same for each person unless you have manually made modifications. When you share an event it will look different between the person from whom the event was shared and the person to whom the event was shared. I think this will make more sense if I show you. 

In this first screenshot you will see Ann [—?—] Simons's will being shared to others. I turned off the notes because the transcript of the will would be too long to show here. 

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In this next screenshot you will see Keating Simons. The above will was shared with him.

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Don't forget, when working with events in general there are several options that govern how events are formatted. I highly recommend you read:

Report Options Part I
Report Options Part II

Census events are the one event that I don't like to share. I just like the full event listed for each person so their timeline is consistent from census year to census year. If I were to share a census, I  would have some censuses shared from the parents, then censuses where the person is the head, and then censuses that are shared from one of the kids when the person moved in with them. The events that I share are ones that have true witnesses, things like marriages, baptisms, funerals, and probate. 

Shared events are very important to me in my One Name Study (ONS) files. I enter unlinked people all of the time but I need to link them to the main tree in some way. This shows me WHY I think they belong.

For example, one of my ONS files has all persons with the name of Simmons (and variants) in South Carolina pre-1800. I have a man named John Ball that just keeps showing up in Simons records. 

• He was a trustee for a marriage where Catherine Simons was a witness
• He was the executor of Benjamin Simons will
• He was a trustee for the marriage of David Maybank and Mary Simons
• He witnessed the will of Keating Lewis Simons
• He was the executor for the will of Catherine (Chicken) Simons
• He was a trustee for the marriage of Keating Simmons and Eleanor Ball

I found out later that John Ball married Ann Simons (his second marriage). The Balls and the Simons were tied up in all kinds of things. 

Guess what, there was more than one John Ball. I have identified three distinct men. When I find a new document with John Ball's name on it, having shared events and dates for all three John Ball's helps me to determine which document belongs to which John Ball. Shared events are invaluable to me in my ONS files.  I have 18 Keating Simons in this file. I know for a fact some of these are different men but I also know that some of these are duplicates with different information. Those shared events help me sort all of that out. 

Here is another example from a previous blog post,  A Shared Events Tip. It shows how sharing helps maintain a connection between otherwise unlinked people.

Ultimately this is a personal choice. You need to play around with both features and see what works best for you. You may end up being like me where you copy and paste some types of events and share other types. Legacy gives you a lot of flexibility.

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.

How to Share an Event (Intermediate)

Last week I showed you How to Copy an Event. This week we will share an event. I am going to use a baptismal event as an example. It just so happens that I have one from a Bible that I am entering from scratch in one of my One Name Studies files. I will only be showing you how to share the event. All of the information and sources have already been entered for this document entry.

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Here is Ann Ball. If you click the plus (+) next to her baptism you will see the option to share the event. The plus sign is already colored in because I have entered some baptism notes. You can see that the Baptism Notes is check marked. Click the Baptism Event Shared option.

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The Shared Events window is empty because I haven't added anyone yet. I need to click the Add one or more people.

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There are two choices, Select from the Name List and Just enter the name of a person.

If the person is NOT in your database, and you don't want to add them, you will select Just enter the name of a person. The name will show up in reports but nowhere else. 

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I know who the people are that I want to share this event to and they are in my database so I will click the first option, Select from the Name List. This will open the Name List with everyone in your file.

I found the four people that I want to share this event with and I have put a check mark by their names. Notice that as you highlight someone to select them, their immediate family appears on the right in case you need to select anyone else in that family. This is a little bit of a short cut so that you don't have to search for them on the Name List. The most important thing to remember is that you have to click the Select button at the top and NOT the Close button (unless you change your mind and want to exit).

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Here are my four people. They are not witnesses though. I am going to have to change their roll by clicking the down arrow next to the roll. John Ball, Sr. was one of the Sponsors so I have change his role to that. I already had Sponsor in the list because I work with baptisms a lot. You can see other roles as well. I can't do the screenshots at full screen so what you don't see is that you can scroll down the list and then you will find the option to Add/Edit Roles. You can add new roles and edit existing roles.

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I have now selected everyone's correct roll. 

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After I closed all of the screens I can click the plus (+) sign so you can see that there is now a check mark indicating that I have shared this event.

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Any person that has had an event shared with them will have a red o next to their event icon. This is John Ball, Sr. one of the sponsors.

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And here is what it looks like on his event list.

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If I open his event I can see his role which I can change here if I need to. I also have a place to write notes specific to John's role and I have the option of using a sentence override like you can with any event. You also see the normal event options at the bottom for excluding the event from the Potential Problems checking and you can make the event Private. 

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How the event will look for the person whom the event was shared from and for the person whom the event was shared to in reports depends on which Report Options you have selected. This is something you will need to play with to get the best output. 

Also, there is a lot more that you can do with the roles. You can edit the role sentences just like you can with event sentences. You can read Custom Event Sentences for more information about that. 

Sharing events is a very important tool for your research as you will see next week.

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.

How to Copy an Event (Intermediate)

Copying and pasting events from one person to another will not only save you a ton of time but you will be assured that your events are consistent. I will be using a census event as an example.

Here is my 2nd great-grandfather and his family in the 1850 census:

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I want you to notice a few things. I have entered everyone in the household in the notes. I have added a couple of explanatory notes in brackets. I did this because Silas and Janet also have an older daughter with the first name of Elizabeth who is already married and out of the household by 1850. I added the notes to differentiate between these three daughters that have Elizabeth or Eliza as part of their name (but we digress...). You can see that I have added a source and I have attached a photo of the census document itself. It took me a bit of time to get this census event just right. You can see that besides Silas there are eight other people listed, Silas's wife Janet and seven of their children. 

This census is part of all of their timelines so I want each person to have this census as an event. I certainly don't want to have to go through the process of creating this event again eight more times! All I have to do is copy this event and then paste it to the other members of the family. 

Step one is to click the Copy button.

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I will close Silas's screen and then Add an event to his wife Janet. Notice everything is blank. All I have to do is click the Paste button.

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Now Silas's wife Janet has the identical event. The source citation and the attached photograph have also been copied.

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Geoff likes to jazz his up a bit adding bold to each person's name for their event like this:

All that is left to do is Paste this event to their seven children. I don't have to go back to Silas to copy it again. It will stay on the Event Clipboard until I replace the contents with another event.

Next week I will show you how to Share an event which is a different process.

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.

Potential Problems (Intermediate)

Here are some tips to get the Potential Problems tool to work for you and not against you.

The first thing you need to do it go to Tools > Potential Problems and set your preferences. You can skip the Records tab, we will get to that in a bit. Look at the Warnings, Problems, Standardization, Gaps and LDS tabs. You will only have an LDS tab if you have the LDS options turned on in Options > Customize >  General Settings > Option 1.9. Review the selections to see if there is anything you want to change. The Gaps warnings is more for new researchers. Seasoned researchers usually spot these gaps automatically. They know that they can signal either an unknown child or possibly a second marriage. I would turn these off for now so that you aren't overwhelmed with warnings. As soon as you have the other problems and warnings cleared out you can turn them on to see what happens. I also turn them off when I am running a report (again, we will get to that in a sec).

Here is another thing you will want to do to decrease the number of potential problems. If you use any events that normally occur AFTER someone died (Cemetery, Obituary are two common ones) you will want to exclude these from the Potential Problems checking GLOBALLY. Go to View > Master Lists > Event Definitions. Highlight the event and then click Edit over on the right. At the top of this box you will see some check mark boxes. Make sure you check Exclude from Potential Problems Report.

Another thing that will cut down on Potential Problem warnings is to globally sort your children and then tell Legacy to sort the children as you enter new ones. You can also do this for marriages and events but those two don't flag as errors. To globally sort, go to Tools > Other Tools > Sort Children, Marriages and Events. Check mark the ones you want to sort and there you go. Now we need to set it in the Options menu. Go to Options > Customize > Data Entry > Option 2.2 (When Adding New Spouses, Children, Events, and Media) and check mark the appropriate boxes. 

Uppercase surnames are no longer the standard in genealogy but a lot of people like to use them. Legacy will flag your names as a warning. Here is what you need to do to avoid this.

1) Go to Options > Customize > Data Format > Option 3.3. Set it to UPPERCASE and click  Apply over on the right to make sure that all of your surnames are consistently in uppercase. Close the customizations screens.

2) Now go to Tools > Potential Problems and click the Standardization tab. The very last entry is Surname entered as all uppercase. Uncheck that box.

You don't want to let the Potential Problems to get too far ahead of you. If something is not a problem then mark it as such by left mouse clicking the Potential Problems icon and checking the appropriate box to exclude it just for this person. If you right mouse click it will take you to the Potential Problems List and you can exclude it here as well by selecting Mark as Not a Problem. I do it this way because I think it is quicker.

I also run a global report from time to time to check on the outstanding ones that I haven't cleared yet. Go to Tools > Potential Problems and then the Records tab). Make sure you look at the listed options because you can restrict the report. 

If you click Create Problems List you can edit the people that have errors right here to review and fix the problems or Mark as Not a Problem. The Preview and Print buttons are for printed reports. I fix everything I can here but I will then print a report for those things that require more research to clear. 

If you have a lot of Potential Problems it can be very helpful to work on one problem at a time which is very easy to do. When you go to Tools > Potential Problems UNcheck every box on the Warnings, Problems, Standardization, Gaps and LDS tabs EXCEPT for the one thing you want to work on. It is much less overwhelming this way.

The Potential Problems is one of my favorite features! It catches all my typos in my data entry but it also alerts me to things that don't seem quite right that need further research. The more data entry I do, the more often I run a report. 

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.

How to Print Landscape and Duplex (Intermediate)

There is a trick to printing a report in Landscape or in Duplex (double sided). You have to tell Legacy that's what you want AND you have to tell your printer. 

Open the Pedigree Chart Report. Notice on the right is a Printer Setup button.  Click that and you will see where to tell your printer to print Landscape.

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To see the Duplex option click Properties on the above screen. What it will look like depends on your printer. You are seeing what my printer properties looks like.

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You also have to tell Legacy. Go back to the main screen when you open the Pedigree Chart Report and click Report Options. Over on the right you will see Page Setup, Headers, Footers... Select that and make sure you are on the Page Setup tab and you will see this:

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For Duplex, the Vertical option produces a list-style report where the pages are flipped vertically (more often used with Portrait). The Horizontal option produces a book-style report (more often used with Landscape).

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.

Combining Hashtags (Intermediate)

What do you do if you notice that you have two Hashtags that are duplicates? Before you get started, make a backup of your file. Whenever you are going to do something that will have a global impact on your file you always want to do a backup first for insurance.

Now go to View > Master Lists > Hashtags. In the below screenshot you can see that I have Military: Civil War which has 6 people and Served in the Civil War that has 2 people. 

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I want to KEEP Military: Civil War because this one matches my naming convention. I am going to highlight and edit the one I DON'T WANT TO KEEP which is Served in the Civil War.

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I am going to change the name of this Hashtag to MATCH the Hashtag I want to keep. In this case I will be changing Served in the Civil War to Military: Civil War.

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Click Save and you will now see a Warning screen. If you are sure you are doing the right thing click OK. If you are not sure click Cancel.

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After I click OK you now see that Military: Civil War has been retained and the number of people has been updated to 8. Served in the Civil War has been deleted.  

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This is one of those things that you would not know how to do unless you are shown which is why I wrote this post. 

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.

Double Dating (Intermediate)

There is an option in Legacy to do double dating which Legacy will do for you automatically. The Option is at Options > Customize > Dates > Option 5.4. So what is double dating? 

In a nutshell, we changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 but it wasn't officially adopted by England (and its colonies) until 1752. The problem with this is the Julian Calendar used March 25th as the first day of the year and the Gregorian Calendar uses January 1st.

The problem dates are January 1st through March 24th. If you are looking at one of these dates between the years 1582 and 1752 you need to double date them.

04 Feb 1740 under the old calendar would be 04 Feb 1741 under the new calendar. Why? Under the old calendar the year 1740 didn't end until March 24th but under the new calendar the new year started on January 1st. You would write it as 04 Feb 1740/1. The reason this is important is when you are looking at the chronology of documents and dates you might get things out of order.

There is one other slight problem with the change over. There was an 11 day discrepancy. In the first year of the change, 1752, they dropped 11 days off of September to get things back right. For further information, please read Julian and Gregorian Calendars from FamilySearch.

Quakers and dates...
All of the above applies to the Quakers too but they didn't use the names of the days or months because they were named after Roman/Greek gods. They used numbers. Sometimes they used Arabic numbers and sometimes they used Roman numerals. As long as you can read Roman numerals there is no problem because you will recognize them immediately.

If you see 2nd day of the 11th month of 1750 in a Quaker record, this would be 02 Jan 1750 on the old calendar and 02 Jan 1751 on the new calendar. January was the 11th month on the Julian Calendar. Double dated it would be 02 Jan 1750/1.

I would not use double dating in your file unless most of your file is located in England and its colonies. If most of your file is located in another European country you can consult the above FamilySearch Wiki article and set the date change date to whatever it was for that country or region. You will see that in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands it is a problem because each region was doing its own thing. It can get complicated.

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.

Estimating Dates (Intermediate)

When you enter a person in Legacy it is common to not know all of their vital dates. Estimating the dates that you don't have can be helpful. 

Legacy's Research Guidance tool will work to your advantage if you have these estimated dates entered. It is possible that you might miss something if you are way off but you can always go in and make adjustments if needed. For more information about the Research Guidance tool please see Legacy 101 - Help with Your Research: Hints, Research Guidance, Internet Searches and Research Guidance and the To-Do List.

But even if you don't use this tool, estimating dates will help you narrow down when and where you should be looking for records. In Legacy you can enter an estimated date like this:

Est 1840
Estimated 1840 

Even though you don't see Est as a prefix in Options > Customize > Dates > Option 5.7 Legacy DOES recognize this as a legitimate date prefix.

There are a few tricks to estimating dates. These are just guidelines! You will immediately see that they don't hold true in all situations but these do give you a starting point and as more information comes in you can fine tune your estimates. The rules for legal documents can vary from state to state and from time period to time period but the ones listed are the most common. Also, these "rules" are more valid before about 1950.

• You can estimate that a couple married when the husband was 21 and the wife was 18 (first marriage)
• Second marriages for males were commonly within 2 years of the death of the previous spouse (a new wife was needed to care for the children)
• You can estimate that a couple married one year before their first known child was born
• Mothers don't die until after the birth of their youngest known child. Father's can die within 9 months before the birth of their youngest known child
• Full term pregnancies are 38-42 weeks
• Premature infants 34 weeks or less normally did not survive
• Children are born an average of two years apart
• Mothers do not normally give birth after about age 46
• You can assume a person died after he is mentioned on a document (census, surviving family in an obituary, witness on a legal document, etc.)
• You can assume a person was at least 21 years of age when named as a guardian, listed on a voter roll, listed as an executor/executrix to a will, or witnessed a legal document
• A male was at least 21 to pay the poll tax
• A person was at least 21 to own property (land)
• A person had either died OR was at least 50 when he drops off of the tax rolls 
• You can estimate that a male is at least 16 year old in military records
• A child who was allowed to choose his own guardian was between the age of 14 and 21
• A person who died between the date he signed his will and the date that the will was proved (probated)

Another great trick is to use the date ranges on the 1800-1840 censuses to narrow down a person's date of birth. The 1790 is not as helpful but don't discount it completely. The ranges are different from year to year so you can compare them to knock out a few years. You can also do this with the later censuses using the OFFICIAL census date as your baseline to calculate when a person was born based on their age. For more information on that, please read William Dollarhide's article, The Census Day.

The trick is to use multiple bits of information to narrow down the dates. Here is a tool from The Golden Egg Genealogist that will help you do just that. You can download the Date Narrowing Calculator (for Excel) for free after signing up for her blog.

Another thing to remember is that you can also "estimate" locations to go along with those dates. If a person is living in Columbia County, GA as a 2 year old in 1850, is living in Columbia County as a 12 year old in 1860, is living in Columbia County as a 22 year old in 1870, and is living in Columbia County as a 32 year old in 1880, chances are he was born in Columbia County and he married in Columbia County. One thing to note, if the husband and the wife were from two different counties it is more common for them to have married in the wife's home county and not the husband's.

I hope this information will help you estimate your dates for your blank vital events so you can narrow down when and where to look for records that will give you more definitive information.

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.