In preparation for delivering some help sessions at my local genealogical society, I am working to become proficient in three genealogy applications:  Family Tree Maker (FTM), RootsMagic  (RM) and Legacy Family Tree (LFT).   I used an early version of FTM in the late 90’s and I’ve been a user of LFT since 2008.  RM is completely new to me.   RootsMagic and Legacy FamilyTree offer a free version of their software with a limited set of features.  Since FTM does not have a similar free option, I decided to use the paid versions of each software package. This series of blogs will document my impressions of and experiences with these three software packages.

In this post, I review the process of creating a family tree file and entering a bit of data in Legacy Family Tree.  I entered a snippet of the maternal side of my family tree:  my grandmother, her husband and her parents.  For each person, I entered dates and places for birth, marriage, death and burial.

Legacy Family Tree, version 7.5.0.201 – www.legacyfamilytree.com

I started the Legacy Family Tree application.  Since I have used LFT for my research data, it opened my family database.  I clicked on “File” and then selected “New Family File…”

The Legacy Guided Setup Wizard walked me through the steps to begin a create file.  I was offered the option to start from scratch, import information from another genealogy program, open an existing Legacy file or open the sample family file that comes with Legacy.

If the user self-identifies as a  member of the LDS church, there is an option to sign into FamilySearch to download information on user and ancestors.   Next, the wizard presented an initial data entry screen.

I did not enter anything here because I was not starting with myself.   After I clicked on “Finished”, I was  able to name my file and select a directory to store it in on my hard drive.

Then I was presented with the following screen with lots of blank fields.    I confirmed that this is the same screen that I would have gotten if I had selected “No” above.

Since I knew how Legacy worked, I knew to add my grandmother’s name into the first field in the large box labeled “Female.”  I suppose it would have been better if I had entered Grandma Ida’s information into the fields for “my” data in the previous screen.

This all blank screen may be a bit daunting to a first time user.   However, I believe that most users would have entered their information on the last Wizard screen, so they would not have seen this totally blank screen.

Below is Grandma Ida’s information.

Below is the family view for Grandma Ida, her spouse and her parents.  This is the LFT default view.   It is possible to change the five fields displayed (birth, christening, death, burial and cause of death) by right clicking on one of the five labels.  It is simple to do, but not as obvious as the “Customize View” button in FTM.   Other views available are Pedigree, Descendent and Chronology.

Summary

All of the programs were relatively easy to use for basic data entry.  LFT may not be as intuitive as the others.  The wizard did include the “Watch Legacy Tour” button, but the object of this exercise was to enter some basic data without peaking at any Help or Tutorial, so I bypassed the tour.

Next time:  Entering a source citation for a census