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See your ancestor in history

See your ancestor in history

Do you have a "brick-wall" ancestor? Are you writing a history of an ancestral family? Do you want to know what was happening when your ancestor was alive? If you answered yes to any of these questions, Legacy Family Tree can help.

For years our family was stuck on Asa C. Brown's family. We knew that he moved from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, and eventually to Minnesota. It wasn't until we used Legacy's Chronology View that things started coming together.

Legacy's Chronology View arranges the known information about an ancestor into a timeline. The age is given for each event in the timeline. It suggested that Asa was married at the age of 39 and moved to Minnesota at the age of 64. Interesting, but not as exciting as the next part….

Historical Timelines

Legacy comes with a variety of historical timelines that can be automatically inserted/combined with an ancestor's timeline. We chose to include the US Wars timeline for Asa. This changed everything!

It showed that in 1812 the War of 1812 had begun. Asa's age was listed as 20 – a perfect age to have served. Just knowing this convinced us to begin looking for military records. We found a pension packet, which included actual letters that he wrote. He explained that the "C" in his middle name stood for Clark (his mother's maiden name) and that in 1848 his home was destroyed by fire. Now we knew why his family moved that year.

Looking at the historical timelines for his children, we saw that they were all of age to have served in the Civil War in America.

Writing your own biography?

These historical timelines bring life to our ancestors, but they can also help us write our own histories. One of the timelines included with Legacy shows all the major Inventions from the year 1023 to 1999. For instance, in 1868, J.P. Knight invented the traffic light. In 1929, Paul Galvin invented the car radio. Did you know that mobile phones were invented in 1947?

If you are stuck trying to come up with good ideas for your own history, simply select the Inventions timeline while viewing your information in Legacy's Chronology View. Legacy will display all the inventions that happened during your life. You might be surprised at how much has happened since your birth.

Download Legacy

If you do not yet have Legacy Family Tree, you can download the free, standard edition at https://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com. However, the Chronology View is only available in the Deluxe edition.

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