Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.
Dead or Alive? (Beginner)
We had a great question from Keith on our Legacy User Group Facebook page:
"How do I mark someone deceased but I don't know her date of passing?"
When you enter a new person into Legacy, Legacy assumes that they are alive unless you manually mark them as deceased or you enter death information. Legacy will also automatically mark people as deceased if you have entered birth information and they are over a certain age (Options > Customize > Data Entry > Option 2.3).
You can manually mark a person as deceased using the radio buttons on the Individual's Information screen (where you actually enter data on a person).
My personal preference is to add an estimated date of death such as Before 1972, After 1985, Between 1970 and 1996, or About 1968. This will trigger Legacy to mark the person as deceased. I only do this if I have some sort of source that leads me to this conclusion. For example, I might be looking at an obituary that says, "Preceded in death by…" This will give me a death date of "Before." If I have two obituaries, one where the person is listed as a survivor and one that is listed as predeceasing, I can then narrow the date of death to "Between." If I don't have any source that someone is dead then they remain alive in Legacy until I do.
Why is this so important? Genealogists should be protecting the privacy of those persons that are still living so it is important to be accurate when you mark someone as deceased.
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.
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