A great question during our recent Virtual Legacy Family Tree User Group meeting helped me unveil a new Legacy 8 feature that I had previously forgotten to announce to you. Mitch asked,
Is there a way to create a report of just the males that were eligible for the different wars?
I answered this question at the 1 hour 25 minute mark by demonstrating how to better use the "Census List" tool. This tool was introduced back in March 2013 in preparation for searching the newly-released and indexed-at-the-time 1940 U.S. census. Today, this tool in Legacy would be bettered named as Who Was Alive On… or Create a List of Potential Individuals since it is not limited to working with the census. Here's how it works….
In Legacy, first go to Search > Census List.
Then complete the three steps.
1) In Step 1, either select the country from the drop-down list or type in the place beneath it. This does not even have to be a country – it can be any location. For example, if you were trying to identify everyone who would have been alive in the state of Minnesota for the 1885 state census, just type Minnesota here. For Mitch, if he was trying to identify everyone of eligible age to have served in the U.S. Civil War, he would enter United States here.
2) In Step 2, enter information to limit the dates. For example, to find everyone who should be found in the 1880 census, select 1880. Or, type in a specific date (to find everyone alive on a given date) or a date range (date range is new to Legacy 8). Typing 1861-1865 would limit the search to show results of everyone who was alive during these years.
The next three options are also new to Legacy 8. Here you can limit the search to only display those people who meet an age and gender condition. In the example below, Legacy will search your family file for all males who would have been alive during the years of the Civil War (1861-1865) and who would have been of the appropriate age to have served.
3) Step 3 provides two options of reporting. Create a Search List will give you a list that you can work with and produce a custom report. Preview a Census List Report will create a printable report.
In the end, you will have a listing of individuals who meet certain qualifications (gender, age and place). In this case, you would have a list of eligible men who would have served in the U.S. Civil War. Legacy found 603 individuals in my family file. Since Civil War research is my favorite, I'm anxious to learn more about these men:
Note that you can use the search feature in Legacy (in either version 7.5 or version 8.0) to make this same type of list. Many people don’t seem to take advantage of the search feature in Legacy but you can set up parameters (three conditions) and then when you have your search list you can search again with one or more parameters (but be sure to click the box that says only search the search list results). A great feature that you should explore.