Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.
Find a Grave Number Field (Beginner)
There are two situations you will encounter when entering a person's Find a Grave memorial number. We are going to look at both.
The person has more than one memorial on Find a Grave
Duplicates on Find a Grave are pretty common but there is only space for one memorial number in Legacy (and this isn't going to change). It is important for you to help clean up Find a Grave by alerting the persons maintaining the memorials that there is a duplicate. Normally I only message the person that created the duplicate and not the person that created the first memorial. You can see the dates for when the two (or more) memorials were added at the bottom of the memorial page.
At the top of the memorial page you will see a button to "Suggest Edits"
Marker photograph copyright © 2009 Robert E. Lee, used with permission
If you click that button you will need to scroll to the bottom and click "Suggest other corrections"
Now you will see a message box where you can explain the situation. I always check the box to have a copy sent to me so that I can keep tabs on which memorials I am working on. I am always cordial and I give them all of the information they need to verify that their memorial is a duplicate.
If the person does not respond within 30 days, or they refuse to make the edit, "…forward your copy of the suggestion along with source documentation to edit@findagrave.com. The suggestion will be reviewed and processed." [from the Find a Grave help menu]. In the meantime, I keep track of what is going on in a Legacy To-Do task.
There are two people sharing a single memorial
You will see this when you have multiple people on a single marker. Each one of these people needs to have their own memorial. If you enter the same Find a Grave memorial number for two different people in Legacy, the next time you do a Check/Repair it is going to delete the duplicates (this isn't going to change). The log file will tell you who had the duplicates and what the number was.
The easiest thing to do is add the second memorial yourself and then contact the person that uploaded the photo, which is not necessarily the person that maintains the memorial, and ask him/her to attach their photo to the new memorial. Click the photograph itself and you will see a link to the person that added the photo at the bottom. Click the link and it will take you to their personal Find a Grave page where you can message or email him/her. If the person has their page set up so that you can't send a message or an email, send an email to edit@findagrave.com and explain the situation. They will contact the person on your behalf.
The way Legacy is set up mirrors the way Find a Grave is set up, one memorial per person with no duplicates. While you are adding your Find a Grave numbers to your file you can help the Find a Grave community clean up the errors.
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.
Clay,
There will always be unusual situations where you have to take the common sense approach.