Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.
Tuesday's Tip – Linking to a Single Parent (Beginner)
Last week I showed you how to Link to Parents but let's say you have someone in your database and you know who their father or mother is but you don't know who their other parent is. There are a couple of different ways to handle this but I am going to show you the easiest. This will work whether the parent is someone in your file or not.
If the child is already in your file put that person in the Family View. If the child is not in your file, enter the child as an unlinked individual (Add > Unlinked).
Now right click in the parents area. You are going to select Add a Father (or Add a Mother).
When you do, you will have the option to add a new person or link to an existing. We are going to Link to an EXISTING person.
The Name List will come up. Highlight the correct parent and click Select.
Now you will see the newly linked father (but no mother).
When you put the father in the Family View, you will see that he is a single parent. Notice that Green Beans has a "2" on his spouse's icon. Green Beans is married but we didn't add his son Lima to his marriage but rather to a new, unknown relationship. If I had wanted to to link Lima to Greens Beans and his known wife I would have used the Link to Parents option instead and that is VERY important to understand. We get a lot of emails from people that linked to a single parent when they wanted to link to a married couple.
If neither parent is in your file, this is when you would Add a Father and then Add a Mother. When you do this Legacy will automatically link the two as a couple. If both of these people are already in your file you would never do this because what would happen is both parents would end up with a second marriage to themselves!
To review:
1) If you are linking to a married couple that is already in your file you will Link to Parents
2) If you want to link to a single parent (whether or not that person already has a marriage), then you will use the instructions above to link to a single parent
3) If neither parent is in your database, you can add them one at a time using the Add Father, Add Mother and Legacy will automatically link them together as a married couple
I hope the information in this article and in the Linking to Parents article will help you get everyone in your file linked properly without creating extra, unwanted relationships.
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.
Lana,
This was covered in the first article, Linking to Parents
http://news.legacyfamilytree.com/legacy_news/2018/08/tuesdays-tip-linking-to-parents-beginner.html