Legacy Family Tree is genealogy software

Genealogy software

Genealogy software is computer software used to record, organize, and publish genealogical data. At a minimum, genealogy software collects the date and place of an individual's birth, marriage, and death, and stores the relationships of individuals to their parents, spouses, and children...

 for Windows that assists family historians in tracking, organizing, printing, and sharing family history

Family history

Family history is the systematic narrative and research of past events relating to a specific family, or specific families.- Introduction :...

. The standard edition is distributed as freeware

Freeware

Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

, with no restrictions, only requiring registration on the company's web site to download the software. Users may pay a fee to "unlock" the additional features in the deluxe edition. The standard edition may thus be considered a kind of registerware and crippleware

Crippleware

In economics, a damaged good is a good that has been deliberately limited in performance, quality or utility, typically for marketing reasons as part of a strategy of product differentiation.-Computer software:Deliberately limited programs are usually freeware versions of computer programs that...

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Features

The software allows 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

GEDCOM

GEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a proprietary and open de facto specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software...

 files and files from Personal Ancestral File

Personal Ancestral File

Personal Ancestral File is free-of-cost genealogy software provided by FamilySearch, a website operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...

 (PAF). 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 for by members of the LDS Church.

The deluxe edition (7.0) includes Legacy Charting, which previously had to be purchased separately. 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

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

 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

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 (Australian, Canadian, UK and US versions), the Danish, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk versions), and Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 versions have been released. Teams of volunteers are, in 2011, working on translations to Afrikaans

Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...

, Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

, Estonian

Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

, Finnish

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

. The software does not support any other text encoding

Character encoding

A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...

 than Western script

Windows-1252

Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...

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History

After three years of development starting in 1995 by Ken McGinnis and Dave Berdan.

• Legacy version 1.0 was released in June 1997.
• Legacy version 2.0 was released on the 17 October 1997.
• Legacy version 3.0 was released in 2001. On December 14, 2000 this version was released as a free demonstration version from Legacy's website.
• Legacy version 4.0 was released on the 14 March 2002 as a free edition and a Deluxe edition.
• Legacy version 5.0 was released on the 18 November 2003.
• Legacy version 6.0 was released on the 9 August 2005.
• Legacy version 7.0 was released on the 2 June 2008.

File format

Legacy's underlying database engine is stored using the Microsoft Jet Database Engine

Microsoft Jet Database Engine

The Microsoft Jet Database Engine is a database engine on which several Microsoft products have been built. A database engine is the underlying component of a database, a collection of information stored on a computer in a systematic way...

: the Legacy database (*.fdb) can be opened in Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access

Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of...

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