Legacy has "Master Lists" where you can make global changes to your file which will save you a lot of time. WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! Before you start working with a Master List please BACK UP YOUR FILE. When you make a change here there is no going back. If you make a mistake you will need to restore your most recent backup file to undo it. Now that we have that out of the way…
You can see the various Master Lists by going to View > Master Lists. Almost all of them work in the very same way so we will just use the Master Event Definition List as an example.
I imported a small file into my main file and it has cause some duplicates in my Master Event Definition List that I need to clean up. Near the top you will see two similar entries:
1870 United States Federal Census
1870 US Federal Census
The second entry is how I used to enter census events. The top entry is how I do it now so I need to combine these two events.
Step 1 – Highlight the wrong event and then click the button at the bottom that says, "Combine the highlighted event definition with another one in the list…"
Step 2 – Highlight the Event that you want to keep and then click the button at the bottom which now says, "Highlight the Destination, then Click this Button"
Now you will only see one entry.
I want to show you one more thing that you can do here. I have highlighted my "Obituary" event and then I clicked Edit over on the right. I only want you to look at the options at the top. The Event Sentences themselves (at the bottom) are an advanced skill. I will tell you that you can customize your sentences so that they will read out exactly like you want them to in reports. These sentences can get very complex to include conditional sentences (if > then). I wouldn't tackle this until you are very comfortable with Legacy and then you can read all about it in the Help File.
An obituary is published after a person dies. Since I will be entering an event that is after death Legacy is going to flag it as a Potential Problem. I can tell Legacy to ignore this specific event when it is checking my file for problems.
Can you imagine if you had 600 obituary events and had to go through one at a time to make them exempt from Potential Problems checking? Ouch! You can make all them exempt with a single mouse click. You can see that you have other options such as removing unneeded fields and marking an event as Private globally.
Again, please remember to BACK UP YOUR FILE before you work with these lists.
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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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