Legacy 101 – Privacy

There are many ways to privatize things in Legacy. Privacy is a big issue so we are going to go over all the ways you can protect your information if you decide to share your information in a gedcom, a new Legacy file, webpages, reports and charts. We will start by learning all the ways you can privatize information in your file and then how you can privatize the different types of exports.

You can mark a person as private or as invisible. Please notice what the difference is between private and invisible as explained in the popup box.

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You can mark a marriage as private.

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You can mark the relationship to parents as private or invisible.

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You can make single events private.

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You can make a particular event private globally (View > Master Lists > Event Definition.  Highlight the event you want to make private and then click Edit over on the right).

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You can mark Stories as private.

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Now a really nifty feature. You can use Privacy Brackets in any field. [[Everything insides these double square brackets is private]]. Most people use these for private notes but you can see here that I am use them in all kinds of places.

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Whether you are exporting to a gedcom, exporting to a new Legacy file, creating webpages, or creating reports the "Privacy Options" dialog box looks exactly the same. We will look at the one you will see in reports as an example. Open any report, click Report Options, and then you will see the Privacy Options button over on the right.

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There are two sections. The top section deals with living people and what you want done with them. The bottom section deals with all of the things you have marked private or invisible, or where you have used privacy brackets. The options are pretty self-explanatory but there is a Help button on this screen if you need more information.

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In Legacy Charting it looks a little different.

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We need to talk a little bit about Living people. If you choose to suppress Living people you might get a few surprises. If you have people in your file that are marked as Living even though they are without question deceased they will not appear in your output. If you go to Options > Customize > Data Entry > Option 2.3 you will see where you can tell Legacy to automatically mark people as deceased when you enter them. You can adjust the numbers as needed.

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It is important to notice what this actually does. As you enter a new person, if you enter a death or burial date, a cause of death, or a birth or baptism date that was more than 120 years ago, that person will automatically be marked as deceased. 

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But what about people that don't have this information entered? There is another option called Advanced Set Living. We affectionately call it "IntelliMurder."  This time Legacy is going to look at the surrounding people. For example, let's say you have John Doe in your file but you haven't entered birth or death information; however, he has a child that was born in 1776. IntelliMurder will kill John off for you.

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You need to run IntelliMurder periodically. I just ran it in my personal file and it killed off one person. After it runs you can tell Legacy you want to see who was killed off. In my case it was William Seaman who married in 1828.

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Legacy gives you complete control over the things that you want to keep private in your file.

View a Compilation of all Legacy 101 articles. 

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.