Legacy Deluxe 4.0

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System requirements	Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP; 40Mb free on hard disk; at least 64 Mb RAM (128 Mb recommended)
Website:	Legacy Deluxe
Publisher:	Millennia Corporation, USA
Price:	Deluxe edition: $19.95 (download only); $29.95 plus postage for book and CD purchase online Standard edition: Free (lacks some of the features commented upon in this review)
Data Entry:		The main screen in Legacy is the Family View. This allows you see three generations of a family - i.e. a husband and wife, their parents and up to 15 of their children - all on the same screen. Entering information is extremely straightforward - just click on the box where you want to add a new person and enter the name and any other information you know about them. You can include as much or as little information as you wish. Legacy offers a standard list of events which you can attach to an individual, such as birth, baptism, occupation and so on. You can also create your own events. Each person can have an unlimited number of events associated with him or her. A new feature in the latest version of Legacy is a customisable sentence structure for each type of event for use in narrative reports. Apart from when reporting on ages, Legacy uses baptism and burial dates to identify a person’s lifespan where birth or death information is not available. A nice feature is the ability to indicate on the Family View the relationship of each person to a specified root person. In addition to that the ancestral line of a root person can be identified throughout the database by the use of bold text. Legacy offers you the ability to tag specific individuals and marriages for use in a number of ways. For example, you can search for all people who were born between two dates and then tag them so that you can produce a list of individuals to check in a specific census. The citation of sources of information is a powerful feature within Legacy. The facility includes a source clipboard which speeds up the process of adding the same source information to many events.
Multimedia:	Legacy allows you to attach pictures, video and sound files to individuals, marriages, events or sources which can then be included in charts and reports. All links to such files can be captioned, so you can add information to place the file in context and some basic picture manipulation, such as cropping, is available. A Picture Centre facility allows you to attach multiple individuals or events to a single picture more swiftly.
Charts:	One drawback of the Legacy program is that it has few charts available. Instead, two add-on programs are available which read data directly from your Legacy database and create charts. Legacy Charting Companion is an easy-to-use program which offers a range of standard charts and reports. These are tailored towards the North American market and, as such, include family group sheets and pedigree charts but no dropline descendancy charts. Output is in PDF format. Hourglass charts are available at Progeny Software. Hourglass charts show an individual’s ancestors to the left and descendants to the right, and bow-tie charts which show paternal ancestors to the left and maternal to the right. Treedraw for Legacy on the Span Soft website gives you a flexible way of producing dropline charts reading information direct from your Legacy file. Individual boxes, lines and branches can be moved around the page to avoid page breaks or to make space for additional illustrations. Charts can be saved and updated when you add further information to your Legacy file.
Reports:	Legacy produces a range of standard, useful reports, such as ahnentafel and descendant books and family group sheets, which can be output in a number of formats. They can be printed directly or saved as a text, HTML or PDF file. Some reports are also available in RTF format so that you can tweak them further your word processing package.
Web Pages:		The production of web pages is a particularly strong feature of Legacy. These are straightforward to generate and can be saved to your hard disk before uploading to any personal webspace you have available to you. The pedigree format is particularly useful, allowing the visitor to your site to navigate easily through your tree using links to parents, grandparents, spouse(s) and children from each page. A surname list is also generated indicating the frequency of each surname on your site and an alphabetical index of individuals with birth and death data gives you another way into the data. Finally, a single source list provides a comprehensive bibliography for your site. Webpages can also be produced in other formats, including ancestor, descendant, family group and individual reports. Backgrounds, graphics and introductory text can be customised and you can specify which individuals and which pieces of information should be included.
Help and support:	The online help files are comprehensive and a printed manual is available to purchasers of the program. The publishers of Legacy are very responsive to user queries and feedback. In addition, updates and bug fixes for the software are regularly posted on their website. Subscribe to user email list offering tips and troubleshooting support.
Conclusion:	This is an excellent package for family historians who want flexible, detailed data storage and good web page output. The program is good value, well supported and currently actively under development. It is unfortunate that the charting functionality is not more fully developed but there are alternative packages available to meet this need.
Rating:	Ease of use Data entry Multimedia features Charts Reports Webpages Help and support	** ** * ***
© Ruth Selman 2002

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