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Tuesday’s Tip – Burial vs. Cremation (Beginner)

Tuesday’s Tip – Burial vs. Cremation (Beginner)

TT - Burial vs Cremation

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

Burial vs. Cremation (Beginner)

On the Individual's Information screen you will see the standard vital events (born, christening/baptism, died, and buried) but what do you do if your family member was cremated instead of being buried? Legacy makes it very simple to change a burial to a cremation. Click the + (plus) sign to the right of the Buried location field and then select Cremated.

Option for Cremated

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Now you will see that the field name has been changed to Cremated.

Field name now Cremated

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We get a lot of questions asking how to handle the scattering of ashes that occurs well after the cremation. This is similar to the question about what to do when the ashes are buried at a memorial ceremony that is held afterwards. I enter these as custom events. 

Custom event

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There is one more thing that you need to do. If you create a custom event that occurs after a person's death date you will need to tell Legacy not to flag this as a Potential Problem. Go to View > Master Lists > Event Definition. Highlight the event you just created and then click the Edit button over on the right. Check the box that says Exclude from Potential Problems report. You also need to do this for other events that occur after death such as Cemetery and Obituary, if you use those.

Exclude from Potential Problems

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Other programs and websites do not have this feature so if you ever export your file as a gedcom you will need to tell Legacy to pull the cremation information out of the burial field and create a cremation event.  You can see this option by going to File > Export > GEDCOM File. At the top select the Other Options tab.

Gedcom export screen

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Being able to record your ancestor's information correctly is very important to us at 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 check out 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, CG® is part of the Legacy Family Tree team at MyHeritage. She handles the enhancement suggestions that come in from our users as well as writing for Legacy News. You can usually find her hanging out on the Legacy User Group Facebook page answering questions and posting tips.

 

Comments (3)

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  • K
    Karen

    Well done Michele…. Once again I learned new tips! 🙂

  • ML
    Michele Lewis

    There is a set of default events but you can enter as many customized events as you want. Once you add the event it will then show up as a default for you to simply choose again. You won’t have to add it each time.

  • DT
    David Turner

    Why isn’t the scattering of the ashes not a standardized event since it commonly occurs? The export to gedcom and having to remember to do something invites problems!

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