Tuesday’s Tip – A Tagging Tip (Intermediate)

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

A Tagging Tip (Intermediate)

When you select Tools > Advanced Tagging there are three options that I want to discuss because they can cause some confusion.

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The first two, Ancestors and Descendants, both have two options and this is where the confusion can come in.

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Most of the time you will be selecting the FIRST option on both of these screens. Here is the difference. The first option only captures the DIRECT Ancestors or Descendants of your anchor person (blood relationships). For the Direct Line Ancestors you can also include Other Spouses, Siblings, and Spouses of Siblings which will pick up a few non blood relations. The second option on these two screens will capture EVERYONE that is connected to the anchor person's Ancestors (or Descendants) in any way so you are going to be picking up all of the collateral lines and bunny trails you have entered. Many people select the second option thinking it will be more complete (and it is) but they don't realize it will capture everyone which might not be what they actually wanted.

The third option on the Advanced Tagging screen is Entire Family Line. This will capture everyone in the anchor person's tree. You can have multiple trees in a single file. If you add an unlinked person and then build a tree around them this will be a new tree. You can read, "Why Add an Unlinked Individual?" for more information about this.

So how many trees do you have in your file? Many people have multiple trees and don't know it. To see how many individual trees you have in your file you can read, "Using Trees" for detailed instructions.

If you choose Entire Family Line you will get the entire tree that your anchor person is in, but not the people that are in other trees.

Some people like to use Focus Groups and you will see the exact same thing here (View > Focus Groups)

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 Understanding what an option actually does will help you get the results you are looking for.

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.