Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Can Your Software Do This? - Series 3: Legacy Family Tree

I posted my latest genealogy software question on 6 July - Can your genealogy software provide a list or report with the ages at death of selected people in your database? Preferably the ancestors of a person, in descending order from most years to fewest years. Or just the top 20 persons, say.

Reader Don emailed me with his method of generating a list of ancestors with their Age at Death for Legacy Family Tree 6 (and it seems to be essentially the same for Legacy Family Tree 7). In order to get only my ancestors, I had to add several steps to Don's list, and to get the Age at Death I had to add a step. I have highlighted my additions to Don's steps in the list below, and modified the formatting a bit (to eliminate HTML things):

* Select the person you want the list of Age of ancestors for. I picked myself and put me in the primary position.
* Click on the [Name List] icon in the top icon row
* Click on the [Options] button on the Name List screen
* Click on the [Advanced Tagging] item
* Click on the [Ancestors] button
* In the [Ancestors Options] screen, click "Direct Line" and unclick the "Include Other Spouses," "Include Siblings," "Entire ancestor Line" and the "Include Multiple Parents" boxes. Click [OK]
* In the {Advanced Tagging] screen, type in a description for your tag. Note the Tag number you created. Mine was Tag 1.
* Click on [Close]
* Click on the [Show All Tagged] item and select the Tag number you created.
* Click on [Close]


The Name list on the Search List screen should show all of the Tagged Individuals.

* Click on the [Close] button.

* Click the [Search] button on the top icon row
* Select the [Detailed Search] tab on the Search screen


There are three sets of boxes here - the Primary Condition, Second and Third conditions. For the Primary Condition:

* In the [Look for whom] box select – Individual
* In the [Where to look] box select – Birth
* In the [How to look] box select – before
* In the [What to look for] box, type in "2007"

For the Second Condition:

* click the box for the "Second Condition" and "And"
* In the [Look for whom] box select – individual
* In the [Where to look] box select – death date
* In the [How to look] box select – before
* In the [What to look for] box, enter – "2007"

* Select [Create List] button on the Search screen.
* Select the [Search] button

* Click on the [Show All Tagged] item and select the Tag number you created.

The list of tagged people will be in the left-hand list.

* Click the [Print] button on the Search List screen

The List Reports Options screen will now appear

* Click on the [Options] tab
* Select a title = what you want included. I typed in "Age at Death Report" and unclicked all of the other option buttons.
* Click on the [*Row 1] tab
* I selected and set up the following

** Surname, given names; sex; Birth Date; Age at Death; Death Date; and Spouse.
** You can add other items via 2 more rows of settings and addition to the report if you so desire.


** You may have to use the [Customize ...] button in order to get the "Age at Death" item on the list.

* To preview the report, click on the [Preview] button in the upper right hand corner of the List Report Options screen. Don't click on the [Print] button until you want to print the report! You can also [Save] the report.

My list of 1,995 individuals took almost 100 seconds to create. It opened in a report format 197 pages long, with 10 persons on each page. There are page format options that would probably reduce the page count.

The list was in alphabetical order, not in Age at Death order. The persons without either a birth date or a death date were included.

Perhaps there is another keystroke sequence to get the report in an "Age at Death" sequence - if a reader can tell me how to do that, I will add it to this post.

Reader Geoff left a comment that listed:

1) Open the Name List by clicking on the [Name List] button.
2) Click on the [Print] button.
3) Click on the [Customize] button, select a field name to replace by clicking on the [...] button, then select "Age At Death."
4) Preview the report.

That works (with many intermediate clicks as noted above) - but you get everybody in your database on the list (I let it work for two minutes and it was 1,200 pages long and still going!). I think that you have to tag "Ancestors" in order to get an ancestors-only list.

Thank you to Don and Geoff for leading me through this. Which genealogy software will be next?

UPDATED 10 p.m.: Tamura emailed that I missed a step - so I added the [Ancestors Options] line and edited several more. This is not easy to do - I switch back and forth between Blogger and the software program and it's easy to miss a step while reconstructing the process. Thanks, Tamura.

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