Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.
Keeping Track of DNA Contacts in Legacy
Did you know that you can keep track of contact information for living relatives in Legacy Family Tree? With a little creativity you can also keep track of cousins who are DNA matches.
DNA is a big thing these days and you will talking to more and more distant relatives that are shared matches. It is important that you have a way to record all of the person's contact info as well as some notes about the connection. Legacy can do that!
All you need to do is make sure that the person is in your database. You know they are related (shared DNA) but even if you don't know how yet you can add them as an unlinked individual. Click on the Address icon, the one on the main Individual's Information screen.
You can add their complete postal address, two phone numbers, email and a webpage, if they have one. You can write everything you need to know about this person in the notes tab. You can copy and paste correspondence in here if you need to. If you save your correspondence as a file, you can simply attach it via the media link. You can attach screenshots of their chromosome browser when compared to you either here or in their main Media Gallery via a DNA event that you add.
HINT #1 – If they use a screen name on the DNA websites that is different than their real name enter that as an AKA. This is especially helpful if they are on all three of the DNA sites but use different names on each. You can easily look someone up by their AKA to see if you have had contact with them before. It is impossible to memorize 800 matches. If you put the AKA in privacy brackets [[IndianPrincess04]] these AKAs won't print in reports.
HINT #2 – I would reserve a tag just for known DNA matches.
HINT #3 – You can use the USER ID field to record important info that you can see at a glance, for example, you can record which line they are in. There are many different possibilities that you can use this field for. You also have the Prefix and Suffix fields at your disposal. Just remember to use privacy brackets if you are putting DNA info in the Prefix and Suffix fields.
HINT #4 – This one is a little timesaver. If you pull up their address in Legacy you can email them from within the program by clicking the << to the right.
HINT #5 – Next to their name on the Address screen you can put some extra info in privacy brackets. If you put [[DNA]] before their name all of the DNA addresses will default to the top. You can then put any specifics after their name also in privacy brackets [[SIMMONS yDNA kit 469534]]. None of this will print. You can then print labels just on these people if you need to do a mailing. There is an option to included only tagged addresses.
The more information you can keep in a single program (Legacy) the easier things are!
I am sure you can come up with some more creative ways to keep track of DNA matches in Legacy.
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.
Patricia,
One of the programmers just sent us an email letting us know that our mail servers are down. He is hoping to have everything back up and running by the end of today so… hold that though! 🙂 🙂 🙂