Wednesday, December 4, 2013

First Look at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - Post 5: Census List

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 things I find as I work through the program screens.

Today, it's the "Census List."  I did not see a preview of this on the Legacy Family Tree cruise, but I noticed it today, wondered what it was, and so I checked it out.


1)  From any "View" screen for a person, click on the "Search" menu item, and then the "Census List" button:



The "Census List" button information box says "Create a list of potential people that might be found in a Census."

2)  The "Search" window for "Census List" opened and there were a number of fields to fill in and boxes to check or uncheck in the "Create a List of Potential Individuals" dialog box:


I chose the country "United States," the place "Massachusetts" and chose the census year "1940" which added the date in the Date Range field.

The "Average life span" field was set at "80," so I kept that.  I did not check the "Only include ages from" or "Only include gender" boxes.

I checked the boxes to:

*  "Include married names for wives"
*  "Include surrounding relatives"
*  "Italicize individuals who appear to have been already found in this census"
*  "Include calculated dates (underlined)"
*  "Horizontal lines between rows"

I did not check the boxes to:

*  "Include alternate names"
*  "Exclude individuals who appear to have already been found in this census"
*  Exclude individuals from this report with location percentages less than" 50% [the user can change the percentage]
*  "Display numbers on names"

There are two buttons at the bottom of the left-hand column under "Create the list or report" - one to "Create a Search List" and the other to "Create a Census List Report."

3)  I clicked on "Create a Search List" and saw:


There are 1224 names on the list from my genealogy database who might be in the 1940 U.S. Census.  If I click on one of the names on the list, their information appears on the right-hand side of the screen above.  I can click on the "Detail," "Edit," "Events," "Notes," "Family," "Sources" and "LDS" tabs to see more information for the highlighted person.

At the bottom of the screen above are buttons for "To Do," "Options," "Search," "Print" and "Help."

4)  Back on the "Create a List of Potential Individuals," I clicked on the "Create a Census List Report" and saw:



The 1224 individuals found using the search criteria are listed on 185 pages with the information requested, with columns for Name, Birth/Chr, Death/Bur, Age on Date, and Possible Location.

For those persons with a 1940 U.S. Census Event or Source, the name is in italics (indicating I've already found them in this particular census).  

For each person, the parents names, the spouse's name (if married) and the children's names are listed to aid the searcher in finding the right family in the census.  Females are in the list by their maiden name, but their married name is listed also.  

Each person in a family group that meets the search criteria is listed individually, so there is some redundancy in the list.  For instance, my father, Frederick Walton Seaver, Jr. has his own listing, and is included in the list item for his father and his mother also.  

There is a percentage number given in the "Possible Location" column, which probably depends on the known Events already in the database.  For instance, since I have a 1940 Census Fact for Frederick Walton Seaver Jr, the program says there is a 99% chance I'll find him in Leominster, Massachusetts if I search for him.  

5)  This Census List feature has a tremendous potential to help researchers find census records for each person on the list.  

There are some obvious problems with a list like this:  the main one is that the database is not complete for every individual.  Someone may have died, say before 1940, and I haven't found that record nor entered it into the database.  A female may have married again after a spouse died or divorced, and if that is not in my database with a marriage date, then the list may not include the more recent married name.  

All in all, this list will be very useful when I start my survey of the 1940 U.S. Census (and other census years also, and England and Canada as well) to enrich my database (that's a big To Do task for me).  

6)  You can Search right from this Census List (or any tagged group of persons) from within Legacy - I'll show that feature in a future post.  

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/12/first-look-at-legacy-family-tree_4.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver



1 comment:

Diane Gould Hall said...

Thanks for sharing this feature Randy.