Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Legacy and New FamilySearch Integration

This was just released by Legacy (Millennia) on their blog.

For many years now, the LDS church has worked on developing a web application for its members (and eventually the public) to be able to interact with a very large, unified database of connected genealogical information. This new system is being released in phases for members of the church first. When the system is “perfected”, it should encourage research collaboration and prevent research duplication.

What about Legacy?

Legacy Family Tree is being developed to interact and optionally synchronize with the FamilySearch Family Tree. Using Legacy, you will be able to take advantage of new collaboration and searching tools, and for members of the LDS church, enhanced tools for ordinance work. For a few years now, we have been developing Legacy’s integration tools, and are closer to having our software officially certified by FamilySearch. We are taking a unique approach to integrating with FamilySearch Family Tree which we believe will make it simple for newbies to get started with their family history, and provide the “power” tools for experienced researchers to benefit from the system. It has been challenging to come up with the right combination of features to make it both simple and powerful, but we know it will be well worth the wait.

When will it be available?

After our integration tools have been certified by FamilySearch (hopefully in the next month or so) and then tested, the new tools will be available in both the Standard Edition (free) and Deluxe Edition of Legacy. Of course we wanted to have it done months ago, but we wanted our implementation to be done the right way. We're aiming for the second half of 2009 for these exciting new tools to be released.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is wonderful. I am a Legacy user for years and looking forward to using this along with the "the new family search" Thanks for all your hard work. D.E.G.Mattingly

Anonymous said...

I sure wish they had done this a long time ago or I would not have switched away from them to RM4. Too many Legacy cruises, maybe.

Anyway--I don't know if I will switch back to Legacy--depends on how easy it will be.

Here's what I miss about Legacy that's not in RM4:

1. Source list shows individuals linked to the sources.

2. Source/citation Reference File ID's easy to sort, view and add within Legacy without having to make a report--easy to generate new ones.

3. MRIN--Marriage and Family ID's are easily found in Legacy--helps with the import I do for online TNG website.

4. Family Mapping available all inside Legacy, whereas with RM4 you have to use an external Program Family Atlas which doesn't even import RM4 database yet.

Again, I am stuck having to use 2 databases--but will see how Legacy handles the new FamilySearch synchronization.