Wednesday, December 18, 2013

First Look at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - Post 11: Migration Mapping Chart

Rather than do a comprehensive look step-by-step at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - I did that for Version 7.0, and 8.0 is an improvement on Version 7.0 - I'm going to highlight new (or old) features I find as I work through the program screens.  New or updated features in Legacy Family Tree are listed in Legacy Family Tree 8.0 Now Available.

Today, it's the "Migration Mapping" feature.  The description of this feature is:


"Legacy animates the ancestor's movement through time. Watch how they migrated from place to place. View their migration in street, aerial, or 3D modes. Hover over the balloon to see what happened in each location."

This sounds really interesting, let's see how it works.  It took me some time perusing the "Help" article for "Map My Family" but it didn't describe how to animate the map.  It was obvious but it took some time to figure it out.

1)  I wanted to see Devier J. Smith's migration map, so I highlighted him, and selected the "View" menu item and want to click the "Map Family" button on the "View" ribbon:



2)  The list of places and the map of places for events in Devier J. Smith's lifetime opened.  There are push pins for the places on the places list (only if those place names have been "Resolved" previously in Legacy Family Tree)::


Each place on the place list can be found on the map by highlighting it.  The user can choose the pushpin colors.

As you can see, the list above is alphabetical by place name.  That isn't the migration path.

There is a dropdown menu just above the place list, and the user should select the "sort Chronologically" rather than "Sort Alphabetically."

Moving your mouse over one of the pushpins reveals the information about the place - the name of the place, and the events that occurred at that place for the selected person:


3)  In order to animate the Migration Mapping, the user has to click the "Options" button and select "Time to pause between location" and select a time from the list (1/2 second to 5 seconds):


4)  To animate the map (meaning to show one place after another chronologically), the user must click on the blue right arrow to "Play - start animation" (to the right of the "Sort chronologically" menu item, as shown below:


After clicking on the "Play - start animation" button, the screen stepped through the migration map one place at a time at 1 second intervals (I selected 1 second).  Below, it is on St. Francis, Kansas:


To stop the animation, you have to click the "Play" button again.

A user can zoom into the map at any time by clicking on the Zoom controls on the upper left corner of the map, or by clicking on the map and using the mouse scrolling to zoom in.  I zoomed in on the Kansas/Nebraska area in the screen below:


The user can also see the satellite view by clicking on the "Aerial" link above the map.  3D map functions can also be selected.

5)  This new "Migration Mapping" feature is very useful.  

The user does have to "Resolve" their place names so that the map can add pushpins at the event places.  That's a feature of most genealogy software programs, including Legacy Family Tree.

Does any other genealogy software program have this feature?  I don't know.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/12/first-look-at-legacy-family-tree_18.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

4 comments:

Geolover said...

Randy, this has been a useful series for LFT8 users.

The timeline mapping is a nice feature.

Can the pins be moved to the right places? In your first screenshot with pins it looks like all of them are a bit south of actual locations.

Geoff said...

As you zoom in, the pins appear to be in the correct places. Legacy does attempt to automatically resolve the locations so there's not much that you manually have to do.

bgwiehle said...

It would be an interesting option if the places were linked with lines (ideally the most likely or actual routes taken) and if the intervals in the animation had some kind of count showing length of residence at each location.

Drew said...

RootsMapper.com has some similar features but requires a familysearch account. It does the geocoding for you.