Tuesday’s Tip – Using Trees

madhattergenealogy@gmail.com

03 Nov 2015

Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.

Using Trees

Adding unlinked individuals to your file is a great way to capture people that you "think" are related but you aren't quite sure. You can add them as an unlinked individual and then you treat them just like anyone else in your file. You can add their family members and you will create a separate tree for this family group. If you ever find the connection you can simply link them to the main tree and all of the members of that tree will be linked.

Here is a screenshot of the trees in my One-Name Study. A One-Name Study inherently has a lot of unlinked individuals but with any luck you will find family connections and start linking people. This is actually a small ONS file because Glaentzer is a rare surname. You can see that my ONS file has 229 separate trees all in one file. I can use the scroll bar to see them all or I can print a list. You can also see that I can tag all of the members of a specific tree which is very helpful. I can also tag the "anchors" of each tree. Legacy has so many cool features.

To reach the Tree Finder screen, choose Trees on the View tab of the Ribbon bar. The first time this screen is displayed, Legacy builds the list. When you return to this screen in the future, the same list is shown (for speed reasons). If you have added new trees or just want to make sure that the list is up-to-date, click the Refresh button.

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 checkout 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 is part of the technical support team at Millennia, the makers of the Legacy Family Tree software program. With over 20 years of research experience, Michele’s passion is helping new genealogists get started on the right foot through her writings, classes and lectures. She is the former staff genealogist and weekly columnist for the McDuffie Mirror and now authors Ancestoring, a blog geared toward the beginner/intermediate researcher.

Comments (7)

But wait, I didn’t figure out how to add an unlinked individual. I tried unlinking one person from the parents that I am more and more doubtful of. That didn’t seem to set up a separate tree for the dubious family.

Louise,
I am sure there will be more than one opinion on this but what I would do is create a dummy parent (child of the grandparent) and would mark the person as invisible and put some sort of description in the name field so that I would know why I did what I did. I would then attach the grandchild to this parent, As soon as I figured out which child was the real parent I would unlink the grandchild and link them to the right parent and then delete my invisible person.

I have a situation where one of my ancestors has a grandson living with him in the 1841 and 1851 censuses in Scotland. I have been looking for him in many other records over the years, but have not found him, so I have no idea which one of the three oldest children was his parent. Is there any way to show him in my tree other than in isolation showing up only through name search?

If you import another Legacy file into your main file it will import exactly as is. Legacy will not try to “link” the incoming information to the tree that is already there. Before you do this make sure you do a check/repair on both files and then backup both files. Now start a new, empty Legacy file and then import both files into this one. This will leave your original files intact. Why go through all this trouble? Because if things don’t go the way you want you will still be able to go back to exactly where you were 🙂 One thing to watch out for and that is duplicates between the two files. If you have some of the same people in both files you might want to tag everyone and then UNtag anyone that would be a duplicate. Then import only the tagged people.

Okay, I figured out how to add an unlinked individual. But I’ve been keeping a separate tree for some suspected but unproven ancestors. Can I import it into my main tree but keep it unlinked? How do I do that?
Thanks.

But how do you add an unlinked individual?

I’m interested in learning how to do a One-Name Study. Any suggestions for articles, books, blogs, etc. that might get me started?

TJ
Tom Jackson

9 years ago

But wait, I didn’t figure out how to add an unlinked individual. I tried unlinking one person from the parents that I am more and more doubtful of. That didn’t seem to set up a separate tree for the dubious family.
M
Michele

9 years ago

Louise,
I am sure there will be more than one opinion on this but what I would do is create a dummy parent (child of the grandparent) and would mark the person as invisible and put some sort of description in the name field so that I would know why I did what I did. I would then attach the grandchild to this parent, As soon as I figured out which child was the real parent I would unlink the grandchild and link them to the right parent and then delete my invisible person.
LB
Louise Booth

9 years ago

I have a situation where one of my ancestors has a grandson living with him in the 1841 and 1851 censuses in Scotland. I have been looking for him in many other records over the years, but have not found him, so I have no idea which one of the three oldest children was his parent. Is there any way to show him in my tree other than in isolation showing up only through name search?
M
Michele

9 years ago

If you import another Legacy file into your main file it will import exactly as is. Legacy will not try to “link” the incoming information to the tree that is already there. Before you do this make sure you do a check/repair on both files and then backup both files. Now start a new, empty Legacy file and then import both files into this one. This will leave your original files intact. Why go through all this trouble? Because if things don’t go the way you want you will still be able to go back to exactly where you were 🙂 One thing to watch out for and that is duplicates between the two files. If you have some of the same people in both files you might want to tag everyone and then UNtag anyone that would be a duplicate. Then import only the tagged people.
PH
Pat Hartman

9 years ago

Okay, I figured out how to add an unlinked individual. But I’ve been keeping a separate tree for some suspected but unproven ancestors. Can I import it into my main tree but keep it unlinked? How do I do that?
Thanks.
PH
Pat Hartman

9 years ago

But how do you add an unlinked individual?
J
Jan

9 years ago

I’m interested in learning how to do a One-Name Study. Any suggestions for articles, books, blogs, etc. that might get me started?