Legacy LVUG Community

Hello everyone. I have a new blog post up about using Find A Grave with Legacy. You can find it at http://www.ourlifepicturebypicture.com/2018/01/for-most-of-2017-i-spent-my-genealogy.html

I want word processed copies of wills in order to put them into Legacy notes if I want to put them there. I have a copy of a literal transcription of a 1683 will and thought I would be smart to use that with OCR and would save myself some word processing time. Unfortunately, I didn't consider that the language in the transcription would make that almost impossible. OCR can't deal with fift (fifth), ffuller (Fuller), Compitent (competent), etc. Many of you probably have already dealt with this, but I thought I would share. It is hard to word process something like this because you yourself "want" to type the words correctly.

I have a teeny tiny hint. If you have census records with poor quality, consider checking Ancestry for its latest version of the document. They have proprietary software that cleans things up nicely.

This is a VERY small thought, but maybe helpful to someone. After watching the seminar on archiving files, I noted that someone used the color coding in Legacy and applied it to their physical files. So I thought about the MRINs. I had already renumbered the first 4-5 generations so that they were in a logical order. I also was thinking about the find your papers method of organizing physical papers. And I realized that the method could easily be applied to my digital history photos. So I set up a master file location, and in that file, I have folders named things like "MRIN-5 Johnson-Smith" where every picture I have for the johnson-smith family will go. I have tried several methods - renaming and name tagging... but this is the best thing I have ever tried. Decisions are easy and file locations easily found.

So I am prepping to make the best use of my time when I am paying for Ancestry this summer. Cleaning up sources (Ancestry really did me wrong on that score, so there is a lot of cleanup.) But one thing I am planning to do is make sure I have an image for every citation that should have one. The quickest, most effective way for me to do this is to use a placeholder image. When I find a "missing" image, I add a placeholder image/file, named by my conventions (i.e. Vital Records Birth Cornelius Wood Alexander.) This way, I can easily see in my media file which records are missing images. AND when I download the missing image, I can simply replace that image. My new data will be a simple "save as" when I find it. (this image is free to use and share.)

Just for info. I submitted a trouble ticket recently that has now been confirmed as a bug and will be fixed in some future update. Merging or deleting individual records that share events with others can cause a record not found error and could crash with a run-time error - and continue to crash on reopening. It doesn't necessarily occur when the recipient of a shared event is merged or deleted - but it does when it's the primary person. Temporarily un-sharing is a workaround. In any event - back up your data before merging or deleting in these cases - not just a merge backup, but a full database backup and it's useful to check/repair and compact after the merge or delete. This may not occur every time - but you could be caught with an unworkable database if you aren't careful.

I'm not sure if this is appropriate for the Legacy Users Group but here goes. If you locate a citation from a book that you don't have access to, look it up on Worldcat.  Find a library that has the book and email the librarian there requesting scanned copies.  I did that twice recently and both librarians scanned the images and sent them to me at no charge. I did send a small donation to those libraries. Good luck!

I wanted a count of the number of people by generation starting from my g grandparents. I got the following in response to my question from Legacy. It's not perfect in that nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters, etc appear but I just deleted them. You still have to count them.  Hubby did some fancy pivot table in Excel but I just would have filtered. ________begin copy________________________________________ You can create a Descendant Focus Group to find the total number of descendants, but it doesn't indicate type of relationship and it includes spouses, so it's not totally accurate. What I would do is set the relationships to the starting person (Tools > Set Relationships), then go to Search > Find > Detailed Search tab and use the search as shown in the attached screenshot. In the Search List, click on Print and select the fields you want to include - don't forget "Relationship" .  Create the report in CSV, open that in your spread...

Using Function Keys F4 & F5 to have your notes window & sources window open at the same time... I just stumbled on a shortcut that allows me to have my notes AND sources window open at the same time when editing an individual.  Here's how it works...and it only works in this order.. (1) Click on Notes (or press F5) to open the individual's notes window (2) Press F4 to open the sources window at the same time. This allows you to edit, copy etc the sources.  You then need to close the Sources window before you can use the Notes window again. I found this useful when reviewing my "Proof" notes that I record to explain why I believe a certain fact.  I can flick between my notes and sources quickly and still have the main Family screen visible to see the key relationships.  Hope this helps someone. Mike

I wrote a blog post on my work blog highlighting some of the Legacy QuickTip videos http://www.gouldgenealogy.com/2015/05/legacy-family-tree-i-didnt-know-it-could-do-that-video

Hello: Tessa asked Geoff in Wednesday's webinar about backing up Legacy 8's settings. I did not hear the answer (perhaps I signed off too early.)  Would someone please post simple instructions for doing this?

There is a new post up on my blog about Legacy and reports and cleaning up your data. http://www.ourlifepicturebypicture.com/2015/03/cleaning-up-legacy-using-reports.html Shannon Thomas (blogging at Our Life Picture by Picture )

In the latest Legacy newsletter that just arrived today this page is referenced.  My question is what are those values listed below the Events window ((B: date) (C: date) etc.)?  Also, how do you set that to display (just in case it's something I want to add :-) ). thanks, james http://news.legacyfamilytree.com/.a/6a00d8341d219b53ef01bb07ed3c0b970d-pi

Another back up your work lesson: I do back up every time I close my program, but I will leave it open for days and just close my laptop cover (have a separate monitor) Last week I decided to merge two file together, and did not back up at that moment, then decided that was dumb as I had cleaned up my master tree, so I stopped the merge and deleted the old file.  The next day I started working and noticed that I had double marriages for EVERYONE, and my tree had more than 40,000 people!  I did contact Legacy when I finally figured out what I had done and had to restore my file from Dec 18th!  I had even broken through a brick wall!  So now I am in my second day of trying to get back all the info that I lost.  I did make PDF files of the two families that I had worked on, and hoping that is all that I messed up.   Now, I am backing up as soon as I finish adding new info.  I have a flash drive attached and back up to that each time! Lesso...

I had a lot of requests about the form I used to track my families through census records in this post.  I finally found the original email that had the original form from the original creator.  Like most good things in the genealogy sphere, she – being… http://aremyrootsshowing.jenny-ology.com/2014/09/24/that-form-everyone-wanted/

Check out this slick way of logging your internet searches: How to easily record a log of your online searches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVfYxqrtj2g

Got this from Kim Komando. Do PDF is a free program that installs another printer to your system. When you go File / Print and select it you can save a browser page to a PDF. My mind is spinning with the possibilities of using this. After download when you install the program seems to work in the background for a long time before it starts to indicate progress. Here is the site: http://dopdf-free-pdf-converter.soft112.com/