Thursday, March 8, 2012

Legacy Family Tree 7.5 Adds Census Year Reports

I missed the Legacy Family Tree webinar yesterday featuring Thomas MacEntee on

Navigating the 1940 U.S. Census - free webinar now online by Thomas MacEntee but I'm going to watch it later today (it's free until 19 March 2012 here).


In his post today, Legacy Update Now Available PLUS Bonus Webinar on Friday, March 9 - Navigating the New Census Tools in Legacy Family Tree  on the Legacy News blog, Geoff Rasmussen announces a new webinar to be presented on Friday, 9 March, and describes the New Census Tools in Legacy Family Tree, with some screen shots.  He says:

"Legacy Family Tree recently released three major census tools to assist genealogists in their census research. While the first two tools relate specifically to the upcoming release of the 1940 U.S. census (new 1940 U.S. census transcription form and 1940 U.S. census SourceWriter template), the third will help with census research around the globe (the new Census List tool). Join Legacy's Geoff Rasmussen, the brains behind the new Census List tool, as he explores these new features and demonstrates their use."

Users need to update their Legacy Family Tree software, then click on the "Census" icon to use the Census tool.  I did that, and was able to create a nice "Search List" report for persons in my database who may be in the 1940 census in California:


As you can see, this report provides the person's name, birth date/place, death date/place, spouse's name, and marriage date/place.  The user can control these items.  I did not see a way to change the order of the items in the table.

This was really easy to create, and I can save it or print it out for my use.  What I like best is that it only takes a series of clicks, some smart choices, and voila - a report.


Is it perfect?  No, mainly because I don't know the death date of many of the persons on this list, and they may live in a place other than the birth, marriage or death place in my database.  I'll gladly take this imperfect list to doing the 1940 census search by a trial and error process.


UPDATE 10:45 a.m.:  In my haste, I neglected an even better report - the "Print a Census List Report."  Geoff noted this in the comment to my initial post.  This report provides the married name, birth date, death date, age at death, and a possible location, with an estimate of the probability based on all of the information available in the file.  Here's a screen shot of it:



Thanks to Geoff for providing the comment.  I like this list even more!


I'm sure that Geoff will highlight the process, and all of the Census Tool features, in the webinar on Friday, and my guess is that I have missed many of the features that have been added to help researchers with a Census search.  

Now I'm off to look at the 1940 Census source template!


Copyright (c) 2012. Randall J. Seaver

4 comments:

Geoff said...

Randy - try the same thing but this time click on the "Print a Census List Report" button instead of the "Create a Search List" button. It does some other nice things such as tell you the age they would have been on the date of the census, and give the place (state) where they would most likely be found and the probability that it would be the correct place.

Jasia said...

Huh. I wonder why this doesn't work for me. I downloaded the new version of Legacy and can pull up Census search box but it doesn't seem to be working... I selected "United States" as the country and "1940" as the census year but then when I click on either "create a search list" or "print a census list report" I get a message that says "No records were found that match the search criteria." I can't imagine what I'm doing wrong. :-(

Diane B said...

Randy, I updated my Legacy, and tried this. It works great, but it pulled up a lot of people! As I looked the list over, I realized I have more problems that could be solved with the census than I thought. Thanks, software guru!!

Jasia - it works better if you enter a state.

Jasia said...

I tried your suggestion, Diane, but that didn't work either. I still got the same message. I tried entering a city with the county and the state, no luck there either. Then I tried other census years... 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930... and they all worked. Just for the heck of it I then went back and tried the 1940 census year and voila! It worked! I have no idea why it worked but it did and now I have my list. :-)Yeah!