What's New in Legacy 7.0

This video previews some of exciting, new features in Legacy 7.0!

1. Mapping – Use Microsoft Virtual Earth to automatically pinpoint and plot important locations in ancestors’ lives from within Legacy. See 3-D, satellite and bird’s eye images of where your ancestors lived. Now it is easy to track your ancestor’s migration.

2. Wall Charts – Experience the enjoyment of showing off your family tree by producing stunning full-color wall charts – ancestor, descendant, fan, hourglass, bow tie, and even DNA charts. Use them for your next family reunion or for a deserving wall in your home.

3. SourceWriter – Cite your sources easily and correctly with the new SourceWriter. SourceWriter makes it simple for you to select the correct input screen so that you enter all the pieces needed to correctly cite any source of information in the thousands of formats that exist for them. The information you enter is correctly and precisely formatted to match the genealogy industry standards for source citations when printing footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies. Multiple citations for an event can be combined into one paragraph, thus avoiding a long string of superscripted numbers within the report body.

4. Interview Reports – Choose from over 1,200 carefully pre-written interview questions and memory triggers to help you capture your family’s memories before it is too late.

5. Guided Setup Wizard – Getting started with Legacy is even easier now. The new guided setup wizard takes you by the hand and guides you through the setup process in an easy-to-understand way.

6. New Relationship Calculator - See how any two people are connected, not only through direct blood relationships but also by marriage. A person might be the "great-grandfather of the wife of your 2nd great-grandnephew. You can also specify how many of these non-blood relationships you want to see.

7. More Powerful Searching – Searching your Legacy data is easier than ever before. You can now search for individuals that are missing parts of names, birth or death information, marriage information and much more. You can also search for missing source citations as you document your family files.

8. Now Attach Any Document to Individuals and Marriages - Along with attaching pictures, sounds, and video to individuals, events, locations, and sources, you can now also attach any other kind of document (PDFs, Word files, etc.).

9. Enhanced Backups - Legacy can now backup your family file and multimedia files at the same time, making it easier to transfer everything to another computer.

10. Edit Records from the "Used By" Lists - All of the master lists in Legacy have an option to view the individuals who use the items in the list. You can now edit those individuals right from the list instead of having to exit the list and edit them separately.

11. Standardization Tips – New alerts will appear if something questionable has been entered in the Individual's Information screen. This helps users keep their data standardized.  The Standardization Tips comply with Getting it Right.

12. Privacy – enhanced privacy options ensure that only the information you want to share will be visible to others.

13. Best Fit Child Columns - The new Best Fit option in the Family View expands or contracts the child list columns to fit the number of children for the current couple. No more trying to guess the optimum number of child columns. Legacy does it for you.

Other great Deluxe features that continue from version 6.0…

1. Research Guidance - Legacy’s Research Guidance helps you locate records that may contain information about your ancestors. It does this in four steps: 1. Legacy helps you review the ancestor’s timeline, to be certain that you've already recorded everything you know about the ancestor. 2. Legacy suggests preliminary survey sources to help you learn if the research is already in progress by another researcher. 3. After selecting your goals, Legacy provides a list of prioritized suggestions to help you accomplish them. 4. Finally, Legacy organizes the sources into a To-Do List.

2. Publishing Center - This new feature lets you select one or more reports and combine them into one large book report. All the information from the various reports are indexed and sourced together and a master Table of Contents is also generated. You can also add a Title page, Preface page, Dedication page, Copyright Notice page, Introduction Section, and Abbreviations page to the beginning of the book.

3. Forms Center - New forms will be added on a continuing basis. These new forms will probably be available online in various packets for those who want to download them.

4. Legacy Home - The new Legacy Home tab on the main screen of Legacy brings you important information about your family file and also gives you a global view into the world of genealogy. It includes Legacy News, To-Do item reminders, birthday and anniversary reminders, general reminders, statistics about your family file, links to update Legacy, technical support links and much more. The built-in browser lets you view Internet content without ever leaving Legacy.

5. Timelines - This feature lets you select timeline files containing events from certain localities, and add them to the Chronology report as background information to show what was happening during a person's life. Timeline files can be created and edited by the user.

6. Potential Problems List - The list of all the problems found are now presented in a grid list that is retained from session to session (until rebuilt by the user). From the list you can edit the affected individuals and correct the problem or exclude it from future checking.

7. Global US County Verification - This new feature checks your entire family file to verify that the US counties you have used were in existence for the time periods you are using them for.

8. DNA - Legacy now lets you record DNA marker test results from several different companies.

9. Location Prepositions - On the Add/Edit Location screen (reached from the Master Location List), there is a field for the location preposition. This defaults to "in" but can be changed to other prepositions like near, around, outside, northwest, etc. These prepositions are then used when building report sentences.

10. Sources - You can now connect source citations to:

This individual never married (individual screen)
This couple didn't marry
This couple didn't have children

11. Book Reports - Complete control of spacing between all sections of the reports. There is a Custom Report Spacing button on the Page Layout tab of the various book reports. This opens a screen allowing you to specify the blank line space above all the various report sections.

12. Book Reports - The Location Index can now be printed with a different number of columns than the Name Index.

13. Note Fields - There is now a Strip HTML button that lets you remove any embedded HTML codes that ended up in the notes because of a Copy/Paste from a web page (for example).

14. Note Fields - There are now Font styles buttons allowing you to bold, underline, italicize, and superscript parts of the notes. The changes show in the notes instead of just showing printer codes as in the past.

15. Potential Problems - Check for sort order of children, Check for children born < 9 months.

16. Soundex Code lookup from the Soundex Calculator - (Tools > Soundex Calculator). When a Soundex code has been generated, you can click the Search Name List button to create a list of all the surnames in your family file with the same Soundex code.

17. RTF Embedded Pictures - When reports are generated to an RTF file, there is an option to embed the picture links in the file. This then automatically displays the pictures in the report when the file is loaded into MS Word or other word processors. The Standard edition only shows the picture paths in the document. The option is set on the Other tab of the Options > Customize screen.

18. Location Report - You can now include the birth and death date information for each person on the report. You can also have the Age of the person shown for each event when the locations were used.

19. Questionnaire - Output to screen/printer or text file.

20. Customize - Right-click any box title to reset the default values for the options within that box. This is done on the various tabs of the Options > Customize screen.

21. Conditional Event Sentences - There is a new IF-THEN-ELSE command that can be used in event sentences to control the output better.

22. Pictures - There is now support for multiple-page TIF files (a TIF file containing more than one picture).

Other great Deluxe features that continue from version 5.0…

ESSENTIAL FEATURES

23. Geo Location Database - A collection of nearly three million current locations worldwide divided into six regions:

PA - Pacific Islands
US - United States
AF - Africa
AM - Americas (non-USA)
AS - Asia
EU - Europe

24. Each location includes the name of the city, the county or province, the state, if any, and the country name. Along with this information the latitude and longitude coordinates are also included. Searching can be done by any field(s). A Radius search is included to find cities within a specified radius (in miles or kilometers) of a location.

25. Descendant View Tab - This new view shows a descendant chart of the current person. Any person can be edited by highlighting them and clicking the Edit button. If the screen is not wide enough to show the entire line of information for a person, highlighting the person displays all their info at the bottom, along with the relationship of that person to the top person in the list. Double-clicking on a person puts him/her at the top of the list and the chart is regenerated. Columns are user-selectable and savable.

26. US County Verifier - When you exit a location field, Legacy checks the validity of county names for locations in the United States (if the Verify US Counties in Place Names option is turned on in the Customize section). An error is reported if:

• No county by that name was ever found in that state. (This could be also be the result of a misspelling.)

• The county was not in existence in this state at the date specified.

• The County had been dissolved in this state before the date specified.

When an error is reported, you can choose to view a list of all the counties in that state to see when they were founded and their term of existence.

27. Child-Parent Relationships - The link between a child and his/her father and mother can now be specified and sourced. The existing Child Status field, which used to cover both the child status and the relationship between child and parents, now only refers to the status, such as Twin, Triplet, Stillborn, etc. The new Parent Relationship fields are used to record how the child is associated with each parent, such as Biological, Adopted, Guardian, Sealed, Step, as well as a place to record Challenged and Disproved relationships. These new fields are displayed on the Children List window as well as the Parents List window.

28. Multiple Lines of Descent Report - There is a new book report style called Multiple Lines of Descent. This is similar to a Register-style descendant narrative book but you can select two or more ends of lines to include in the report. When the report is generated, the first line is printed as a normal Descendant report would be. Then the next line is started on the next page, and if it intersects with the first line, a message is printed indicating where to look in the first line for the remainder of the descendant line.

INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE REPORTS

29. Reports in Different Languages - Many reports in Legacy 7.0 can now be generated in several languages including German, French, Spanish, Norwegian, and Dutch. Additional languages are being added. You can now send reports to your friends and relatives in other countries that they can actually understand!

NEW REPORTS

30. Calendar Creator - Create your own calendars, complete with pictures, birthdays, and anniversaries. There are options to include a cover picture (front and back), picture pages above each calendar month, and complete control over color, layout, shadows, fonts, page size, etc. Create complete yearly calendars suitable for gifts.

31. File ID Numbers Report - A new report lists all the filing numbers used in a family file and shows where they have been used. Options let you filter the report to specific areas if desired.

32. Name List Reports with Multiple Lines per Record - You can now design your list reports with up to three rows of fields per record, thus greatly increasing the amount of information for each person.

MASTER LIST OPTIONS

33. Master Location List Mapping- There is now a new button called "Maps" that shows up when a location is highlighted that has latitude and longitude values entered. Clicking the button currently takes you to MapQuest and displays the appropriate map showing a star at the designated location. If there is no lat/long, you are taken to Yahoo maps using just the City, State parts of the location.

34. Master Location Maintenance - You can now Expand and Contract state names, Canadian provinces, several other country breakdowns, and country names in your Master Location List. This can be done for all locations, tagged or untagged locations, or verified or unverified locations. There is also an option to add or remove "USA" from USA locations. This can be applied to either the Long or Short location names.

35. Save Your Place in Master Lists - New "Set Bookmark" and "Go To Bookmark" options have been added to all master lists. This lets you save your place from one session to another - helpful, for example, while working through the Master Location list, cleaning up the entries. These new options are reached by clicking the Options button on any master list window.

PRIVACY OPTIONS

36. Private Individuals - Any individual in the family file can now be marked as Private. All reports now have the option to include or exclude these private persons. If cousin Harry tells you to keep his dearly departed wife's information off your web site and out of your reports, you can now easily do so.

37. Private Event Definitions - You can now mark any Master Event Definition as Private so that they can be excluded from reports and web pages.

CONVENIENCE

38. Event Definitions - Added a checkbox to exclude an event name from the Potential Problems report. Things like Obituaries and Probate customarily happen after a person death. These event types can now be excluded from checking.

39. Note Fields - Added Ctrl-F to all note fields for searching. F3 then searches for the next occurrence.

EXTREMELY HELPFUL NEW FEATURES

40. File ID Numbers - A new option lets you easily find the next available file reference number in whatever format you have been using.

41. Family/Pedigree Views - Hover Information - Holding the cursor over the Spouses icon shows the names of all the spouses in the popup tooltips. Hovering over the Parents icon shows the names of all the parents. Hovering over the AKA icon shows all the alternate names for that person.

42. Entering Information - A new feature now remembers the last ten locations that you have used. You can then pop them up on any Location field and copy them in with one click. You just right-click on the "in" label in front of a location field on the Information, Event, and Marriage forms to get the list. The ten most recently added locations are recorded with the most recent at the top of the list. Older locations sink down the list and fall off the bottom as new locations are added. They are also saved between sessions. This feature is very helpful when entering recurring locations that don't "sort to the top" for the auto-fill feature.

43. Legacy 7.0 also now remembers the last ten dates entered. You can then pop them up on any Date field by right-clicking on the label to the left of the field. The Date feature works the same as the location feature above.

44. Family View - Who is marked as Living? A new feature colors the Husband and Wife labels as well as the child numbers if they are marked as Living. (This is set on the Data Format tab in the Customize screen. You can turn the option on and off and also select the color to use.)

45. Events - A new Event Clipboard lets you memorize and play back events saving you lots of time. Sources, pictures, and addresses connected with the event are also saved to the clipboard. See Add or Edit an Event.

NEW REPORTING OPTIONS

46. Marriage Screen - You can now specify your own words for "Spouse" and "Marriage" for each couple. If the couple wasn’t married then you might use words like Partner and Partnership. These words are then used on all the reports in the appropriate places. (Beta testers, please let us know if you find any reports where the replacement words are not being used.)

47. Picture Family Tree Chart - The options to print 1, 2, and 4 generations has been added. If printing one generation, you can move the picture higher, lower, left, or right.

48. Name List Report – You can build three separate custom lines per record now. This gives you much more flexibility when laying out the information you want to include on the report. There is also a new option to print the report to comma-delimited (CSV) format.

49. Timeline Reports - You can now color code the boxes.

50. Descendant Charts - There is a new numbering option, d'Aboville.

NEW VIEW OPTIONS

51. Chronology View - There are now options to include the death event of Parents, Spouses, and Children.

52. Index View and Name List - Direct line individuals are bolded.

AND MORE...

53. Web Page Creation - There is now an option to use a solid background color instead of white or a patterned graphic.

54. Marriage List - You can now click on the Options button on the bottom of the Marriage List and from the popup menu select to change the sort order from "Sort by Surname, Given Name" to "Sort by Given Name, Surname".

55. Desktop Wallpaper - You can now select any picture within Legacy and have it applied as the background of your computer desktop.

56. Event Sentences - Whenever you save a set of Event Sentence Definitions, they are "memorized." When defining a subsequent set of definition, you can click on a sentence label to repeat the last "memorized" sentence. Right-clicking on a label offers to repeat the entire set of eight definitions. This is useful if you want to use an existing set of definitions as a template when adding a new user-defined event.

Other great Deluxe features that continue from version 4.0…

57. Alternate Names in the Name List – Alternate name spellings (AKA’s) can now be included in the Name List. Now you can see all the names a person was known by.

58. User ID# in the Name List – You can now show your own file numbering system sorted in the Name List.

59. Master Location List – You can now sort all your locations without including any leading prepositions, such as "of," "near," "at," "from," "close to," "off," etc. Now all the "of Bergen, NJ"s will sort with the "Bergen, NJ"s. This new option is on the Sort Location List screen.

60. Event Report – Legacy has a great new report—a report showing individuals and the selected events related to them.

61. User Defined Internet search URLs - Now you can add your own favorite Internet search sites right into Legacy and search for anyone in your file with the click of a button. Save groups of your hard-found search sites for quick retrieval.

62. New Chronology View and Report - Quickly see a person and all the events surround his/her life, including vitals, events, notes, children, marriages, marriage events, marriage notes. Different types of events can be color coded for easy identification. You can also produce a nice printed report containing a built-in timeline of a person’s life events.

63. New Index View - The Index View displays all the individuals in your family file. The information displayed includes the record number (RIN), full name, sex, and the birth and death date and place. The columns can be customized to display many different pieces of information.

64. Global Spell Checking - You can now have Legacy run through your entire family file and check the spelling on any note type field. You can even stop and resume at will.

65. Distance and Bearing Calculator – You can now use those strange latitude and longitude values for something useful. This new calculator will tell you the distance in miles (or kilometers) between any two points on earth. It will also tell you which direction to travel. You can also convert decimal bearing values to the needed degrees, minutes and seconds. It even ties into the Master Location List where you can select any two cities (with lat. and long. values) and quickly figure out how far they are apart and in which direction.

66. Ancestor Coloring Option - Ancestor and Descendant type reports and many screens can now show colors associated with one of the four grandparents lines. There is also an option to color males and females differently on reports.

67. ToDo Clipboard – You can now memorize ToDo items for quick playback on other individuals. Often an item applies to more than one person. The new clipboard feature saves you a lot of typing…

68. Quick Copy to Source Clipboard – Now, while looking at the Assigned Sources screen, you can quickly copy one or more source citations right to the Source Clipboard. This lets you continue the citation of an existing source faster than ever.

69. Advanced Set Living – You can now have Legacy intelligently run through your family file and set the Living tag to NO for all the individuals that are certainly long-since departed. By analyzing surrounding information and watching the generation numbers, Legacy will set the proper value for all those ancestors without any birth or death dates.

70. Location, Source Citation and Master Source Verification Tags – You can now mark master locations and master sources with a Verified tag to indicate that you have checked them as being valid. For example, you may have a city listed under two different counties in your Master Location List and verified that they are both correct according to the timeframe they were each used. Marking them as "Verified" will remind you not to combine them into one location in the future.

71. Event Sentences – Each event type now has its own sentence structure that is used when displaying the event information in reports. Of course, you can change the sentences around to any way you want them.

72. More Tags – We have added six more tag numbers for a total of nine. This lets you create many more groups of individuals and marriages.

73. New Picture Center – In the past you had to go to an individual or marriage and then assign each picture one-at-a-time, selecting the location and filename each time. Now, with the new Picture Center, you can view a list of your pictures and a list of individuals side-by-side and make assignments with the click of a button. You can even assign a picture to more than one person at a time. Just highlight all the people you want to link a picture to and click Assign. It was never easier or faster to add pictures to your family members.

74. Move Non-Sources from Master Source List to Notes – Only true source information belongs in the Master Source List. Oftentimes, when you receive information from other people, you find sources containing things that really belong in the Notes fields. This helpful feature automatically moves non-source entries into the notes for the individuals they belong to.

75. Move Non-Locations from Master Location List to Notes – Trying to keep your Master Location List cleaned up is a full-time job. When you import information from other people, the location fields often contain information that does not belong there. Often, this information is valuable and worth keeping. Using this handy feature, you can quickly move the information from the Location List to the Notes fields where it belongs.

76. Produce PDF files from previewed reports. These can be sent by email and read in the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe. They retain all the formatting, lines and color of the original report so the recipient can view the reports in all their glory!

77. Compare Two Files for Duplicates allows you to see if there are individuals or lines in another file that you might want to import. How often have you wondered if you were related to someone in another person’s family file? Now you can quickly see if your lines overlap. You will find more relatives than ever before.

78. The new Advanced Sourcing features lets you assign sources to a group of individuals or marriages at one time. You can select the fields you want the sources to be applied to. This is an easy way to go back and document groups of records that came from the same source.

79. Many reports can now include a Location Index showing what pages each location is used. Because the index groups the locations together, you can easily see all the family members that lived in the same places.

80. A new Relationship Calculator lets you see every way any two people are related. See if you married one of your cousins. See how many ways you are related to your 5th great grandfather. People are often related in many ways to another person. Now you can see them all!

81. The new Relationship Charts ties into the Relationship Calculator and allows you to produce wonderful charts in color with pictures and fancy boxes to impress all who see them.

82. When doing Merges you can specify any pair of individuals as being Not Duplicates. Often times you may have felt like you were wearing out the Skip To Next button as you came upon pairs of individuals you knew were not duplicates but had similar names and information. Now you can mark these pairs as Not Duplicates so they don't continually show up in subsequent merge sessions.

83. You can now Renumber RINs and MRINs. You can renumber specific individuals or marriages as well as groups of records. If you always wanted to be #1 in your file, now it’s easy to do.

84. You can now Reuse Deleted RINs and MRINs when adding new records and importing. No more leaving empty holes within your family file when deleting or merging people.

85. You can select the color of boxes on Ancestor, Descendant and Pedigree Charts. This really makes the charts more attractive when printed on a color printer.

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