Sneak Peek of Legacy 7

Well the day for the Sneak Peek of Legacy 7 at BYU's Family History & Genealogy Conference has arrived and boy am I excited for this new version. To tell you the truth I was happy with what I already had and couldn't imagine what Legacy had up their sleeve.

Geoff Rasmussen was our presenter. There was no handout so I tried to take good notes for you.

1. When you set relationships Legacy will now figure non-blood related relationships. Finally a way to determine how you are related to everyone in your database, even if only by marriage. The other thing relationships will show is on the family view it will give you a + sign to tell you if you are related more than one way to that person. You could then look in the relationship calculator to see all the ways you are related.

2. On the Main Toolbar there is a little icon for the homepage. You don't need to only use the Legacy Home tab to get there.

3. IGI Search feature has a field to see BESP temple ordiances that are completed. (They actually have the feature in Legacy 6 latest download.)

4. This was major WOW for me - SOURCE TEMPLATES. Legacy built their source templates around Elizabeth Shown Mills author of "Evidence" guidelines. In fact with this whole new animal - Legacy Sources, you wouldn't even need to buy Elizabeth Mills new 885 page book that is coming out. When you choose your template and fill out the fields you can see the Output Preview of how it will appear as a Footnote/Endnote, Subsequent Citation or Bibliography. The source will be compiled using genealogical standards ready for publication. You can define what method you want to use. The other cool thing with sources is that you can enter "Keywords" and then be able to filter and search by them. The keywords fields are Locality, Year Span and Major Surnames.

Since Source Templates are new you will need to gradually transfer your existing sources over to the new format. When you upgrade to version 7 your version 6 or older sources will be generic so you will have to go in and tweak them so you can show them as a U.S. Federal Census, Book source, etc. Unless you are planning to publishing your genealogy Geoff didn't recommend that you rush to transfer over to the new format. Just use the templates as you enter new sources and work on the updating the old format ones as you have time. (I know myself and new toys, I will work on all my sources and transfer them over right away!)

5. You read it right earlier Legacy is going to add the ability to create Footnotes. That will make life easier for many users wanting that feature for creating books.

6. With Legacy Multimedia you can now attach Documents. You can add them as RTF or PDF format. Not sure about the other formats but I know those two were available.

7. Reports - Interview Questions. You can now get a list of tons of interview questions to ask your relatives. You can even select what relative you are interviewing and the questions will be geared toward them. Not sure how to explain this very useful tool but it will make me more prone to use Legacy over my Personal Historian software. What I plan on doing is copying the questions into Text format, copy and pasting them into Legacy notes and just writing the answers right in Legacy as I get the responses. I just hate a lot of extra paper floating around. How you use it is really your own preference.

8. Now this is a BIGGIE, every Legacy users has been asking for better CHARTS. Legacy 7 will have the combined features of PAF Companion and TreeDraw built right into it. No need to export your gedcom into FTM just to get those drop down boxes. The types of charts available: Ancestor, Descendants, Fan, Hour glass, and Bow Tie. You can make charts using Legacy, a GEDCOM, PAF, FTM and RootsMagic files.

There are various themes and colors. You can use Mary E.V. Hill's color-coding system. You can make charts on a single page up to Wall Size charts. You can choose page boarders, box styles, line color and width and backgrounds. All these charts can be printed on nice paper and beautiful enough to frame. You can grab boxes on the charts and rearrange them to your liking. It seems very easy to use and not at all confusing as GenBox was for me. Oh ya, you can even make a father or mother chart. The father chart would show direct line ancestors on your father's surname. The mother chart shows the female side of the family. That would be very useful for those researching your DNA. You can even choose an ancestor and just print out a chart of all their male descendants for possible targets for hair plucking samples.

You can print charts, export to file, create a PDF, bitmap or jpeg - might be more options later. You can also choose to email the chart to someone right from Legacy. It will open your email client, attach the chart you created and let you type a message and sent it. Legacy also has the option for you to order the chart right from them from within the program. Not sure of the cost on the charts.

One thing Geoff kept saying to us was that he didn't even get to the good stuff yet. He couldn't cover everything in the hour that we had. I was kind of hoping conference attendees would get to buy and take home the new version, but no such luck. Legacy is planning on version 7 to be ready for released in October. The only way to buy it now is to purchase Legacy 6 and then you will automatically receive version 7 when it is released.

I will be going back Thursday to see the rest of the sneak peek preview and report back.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day.