Tuesday's Tips provide brief how-to's to help you learn to use the Legacy Family Tree software with new tricks and techniques.
Ancestor and Descendant Interest (Beginner)
The ancestor and descendant interest option allows you to set a rating for how interested you are in any particular ancestor or descendant.
To use this feature you have to first turn it on. Go to Options > Customize > Data Entry > Options 2.7 Ancestor/Descendant Interest (ff).
Notice the (ff). This means this setting is Family File specific and you will have to set it for every file you have, if you have more than one.
You will now see two new options on the Individual's Information screen.
You can set these numbers from 0-3. These number represent how interested you are in this person's Ancestors and/or Descendants. Even though it is represents this person's ancestors and descendants, those ancestors and descendants will not have their numbers filled in. Why? Because you set them for each person individually to show how interested you are in THEIR ancestors and descendants.
For my James Simmons I have set his Anc to 3 and his Des to 1. This means that I am VERY interested in his ancestors but not as interested in his descendants.
So what will this do for you? This gives you an additional level of search criteria. If you go to Search > Find > Detailed Search you will see that you now have options for the Anc. Interest and the Desc. Interest and you can choose 0-3.
Doing searches is more of an intermediate skill but I wanted to at least introduce this. This particular criterion works best (in my opinion) when you couple it with other criteria. For example, I can find all my Simmons relatives that I have a particular interest in. This will significantly reduce the numbers on my Search List considering I have 552 Simmons in the file. You can combine this with any of the different criterion on any of the different search windows and with as many as you need. Another example, I could do a search for every Simmons, who I have an interest in, that has birth information but does not have death information.
Searching is one of the most powerful tools in Legacy and this gives you another layer to work with.
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.
Michele, Your lessons and informational pages are very beneficial to me. Thanks! Martha