Legacy Family Tree 4 Software Review

Legacy’s newest version, 4.0, won’t disappoint users of the free, downloadable Standard Edition. But shell out for the Deluxe Edition, and you’ll reap the rewards of dozens of additions and enhancements. Among them:

• Chronology View and Report — This screen summarizes all the events you’ve recorded about one person, from vital stats to land sales. The related Chronology Report creates a printable timeline of that person’s life.

• Index View — For quick reference, this view lists everyone in your file. You can sort by name or record number.

• Picture Center — Adjacent lists of pictures and people let you link images to everyone they’re related to.

The Deluxe Edition also offers new ways to customize Legacy, including color-coding options, changeable toolbar buttons and Web-search bookmarks. Ease-of-use improvements let you ignore prepositions such as near, at or from when sorting locations, as well as analyze people without birth or death dates — if they’re too old or too many generations away, Legacy automatically sets the Living tag to no.

Version 4.0 also enhances Legacy’s research-sharing features: When you merge data from other GEDCOMs, you can weed out source and location info that doesn’t belong and move it to your notes.

See all version 4.0’s tweaks at <www.legacyfamilytree.com>. Both editions require a Pentium-speed processor, Windows 95 or higher, 35MB hard disk space and 16MB RAM (32MB recommended).

From the August 2002 issue of Family Tree Magazine