Legacy Family Tree


Legacy Family Tree is genealogy software for Windows that assists family historians in tracking, organizing, printing, and sharing family history. The standard edition is distributed as freeware, with no restrictions, only requiring registration on the company's web site to download the software. Users may pay a fee in order to conduct Product activation to "unlock" the additional features in the deluxe edition.

Features

Features of the software allow groups of people to coordinate their work and track each other's changes. When two files are open, entire lines can be dragged and dropped from one to the other. Multimedia support includes pictures, sound clips, and videos; images can be displayed individually, in slide shows, or as screen savers. The program imports and exports standard GEDCOM files and files from Personal Ancestral File. Links to the Internet allow searching online databases for any person in the family file.
Other features include search and replace, spell checking of all notes, source documentation features, and relationship calculation. For users entering U.S. information, the program issues a warning if the county entered did not exist at the time of the event. TempleReady reports can be produced by members of the LDS Church.
The deluxe edition includes Legacy Charting. Legacy Charting locates all Legacy files on a hard drive, allows the creation of charts from any Legacy file, and uses a Chart Creation Wizard to help the user create a chart and customize the charts' appearance. They include large-scale wall charts, including drop-down descendancies, fan charts, hourglass charts and DNA charts. Locations where a person's ancestors lived can be automatically mapped.

Languages available

A printed manual and tutorial videos are available in English; the program and the help files are available in several languages, referred to as international releases. In addition to English, the Danish, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian Nynorsk, Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish versions have been released. Teams of volunteers are, in 2012, working on translations to Afrikaans, Chinese, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The software does not support any other text encoding than Western script.

History

After three years of development starting in 1995 by Ken McGinnis and Dave Berdan.
Legacy's underlying database engine is stored using the Microsoft Jet Database Engine: the Legacy database can be opened in Microsoft Access.