I've been using Legacy for several years now. When people think of family tree software, I think most people think of Family Tree Maker, it's easy to find at Best Buy. Legacy is one of the competing software packages. It's the only one I've ever used and I love it. Several genealogy packages were recently reviewed by Family Tree Magazine, and Legacy got the best review.
Legacy is cool because they have a free version. And it's not like it's free for 30 days or free with popup ads, it's just free, and fully operational for your family tree needs. I used the free version for years. I just upgraded to the paid version a few months ago. The pay version is only $30. I upgraded because I wanted to create some more complex reports than the free version allowed.
I don't like Cyndi's List. That's a website that is a list of genealogy resources. All genealogists seem to love it; I hate it. Cyndi started the list before Google existed. Now that we have Google, I don't see why we need her list. And a huge number of the links on her list are outdated or broken. I know this because I decided to put my family tree on the web.
But first, let me back up. Before I was browsing other people's genealogy sites, I bought a book called Planting Your Family Tree Online. Incidentally, it happens to be written by Cyndi of Cyndi's List. I wanted to know the best way to use the web to organize my small tree of 600 or so names. The book sucks. She just kept saying things like don't use turquoise font, which is true of any site, not just a genealogy site. The best advice I got from the book was that one should look at other people's genealogy sites and copy one that I liked.
So I was at Cyndi's List taking her advice and trying to find someone else's genealogy site that would give me some inspiration for an appropriate layout. That's how I learned that a huge number of her links are broken. I got bored after about 30 minutes of looking at broken links or people's sites from 1993. I did not find a site worth copying and gave up pretty quickly.
I remembered that Legacy could create web pages. I guess I just didn't think they would be anything any better than the junk that's already out there. But I tried it. You just click on Create Web Pages and it brings up a short wizard. After filling it out you can choose from 5 different templates. It takes only a few seconds to export your web pages and you can view them immediately exactly how they would look on the web.
If you like them, then you just use a FTP utility to copy them to your website. I use a utility called 3D-FTP and it takes 2 minutes to copy.
Feel free to comment or contact me if you need more guidance on how to do this.
Check out my site! http://honeydays-ancestry.com/
1 comment:
I do like how the site is laid out. I've got an Ancestry.com page that's a bit cumbersome to work with, and not easily available to all. I'll have to check out Legacy. I've only been doing family history for about a year now, so it's nice to get your perspective.
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