I'm leaving Legacy Family Tree for the cloud

I have started the genealogy do-over over and over and I sputter out on the data entry portion after a few months, in large part, because working with Legacy Family Tree as my primary system of record just isn't working for me. That conclusion took me about five years to come to, in large part because Legacy Family Tree does so many things well.   I have loved working with the software.  But at the end of the day, it makes my data a complete silo, which can be a positive for some folks, I'm sure.  But for me, it's just not working.

I need the ability to share my data.  And if I'm going to have the ability to share it with family and friends, I would prefer that where I share it already have an active user base so that I can have easier interactions with other researchers about my data.  So, while I considered buying a domain and setting up a website for my data to make it shareable with family and friends or people I correspond with, that first, is a whole lot of work and second, it wouldn't have the community of researchers around it that I'd like for my data to have.

I need the ability to work on my data somewhere other than my desk.  Legacy Family Tree, for all of it's wonderful features, is a tether.  I've gone so far as putting my data onto a NAS (network attached storage device... like a hard drive that anyone on my wireless network at home can access) and installing the app on both my laptop and my desktop, which gives me the ability to work with it from anywhere inside my home on one of those devices.  But I salivate over the ability to do the same work on any device or from any pace, just like I can with my genealogy data that is NOT stored in Legacy... like photos and documents I store in Evernote.

The Magic of a Horizontal Family Tree

Photo : Horizontal Family Tree / Carrie Norwood

Last week a cousin contacted me.  He'd had his DNA processed at FTDNA and was excited to find that FTDNA says we are fourth cousins.  His father was adopted and he believes us to be related on his father's side.  If I only knew who all my 3rd great grandparents were, we might unlock the mystery of his father's heritage!

Unfortunately, he and I are genetically related on a branch of my family tree that I know very little of.  Or should I say, that while I know we are related on my father's side, he and I are NOT related on the branches of my family tree that I have identified MRCA genetics on or that I know a great deal about through research. So I don't have  fairy tale story of unlocking the family mysteries of my adopted 4th cousin once removed (even were the FTDNA estimate to be accurate, which is another post altogether, I'm sure).  But I do have a fairy tale about how freakin' easy it was to get a list of my 3rd great grandparents.

Using Evernote for Genealogy Research

Could I just say... I pretty much live in genealogy geek paradise.

• I have covered 4,000 years of family history in my research.
• I have squirreled away tens of thousands of pages of genealogy related books, photos research reports, newspaper articles, vital records and pages of notes in 700 documents
• My research includes over 30 years of effort from my grandmother and me

.... and I can find absolutely any of it within seconds.  

I can cross reference the state of Tennessee with the name Yarbrough or find every note, photo or scrap of evidence related to my civil war ancestor, Drew Sinks with a few clicks or by typing a few words.  I can create entire research articles with full citations within hours or days instead of weeks.  I have access to entire digitized books on the history of Kent or North Carolina that mentions my ancestors.

I can do all of that with Evernote.  And it can be done for free!  Evernote is a note taking application that I use to organize pdfs, images, documents and research notes related to almost every aspect of my life - but more specifically, to this blog, my family tree stuff.

Legacy Family Tree : Why I Like It and You'll Like it Too

If you've never had the pleasure of compared genealogy software, I'm about to save you a whole lot of headache.  Genealogy software is not the polished application you would expect from say - Microsoft.  It's built by genealogy companies who hire a software developer or happen to know someone who does 'software stuff', not software development houses.  Software development and UI design are complex.  And so is genealogy   The combination of the two, regrettably, mostly winds up being a clunky interface with lots of features that are really difficult to use.

I took my first foray into genealogy several years ago.  And at first, there is this process of information overwhelm.  There are thousands of people out there who have done massive amounts of work and there is tons of data there for the taking - sometimes even entire family trees.  I was in internet research hog heaven!

During that phase, I collected what I could and put it together the best I could so that I could kind of wrap my head around what was there.  I found Legacy Family Tree on a free software site and used it to create my own gedcom file  so that I could send it to my grandmother to say "Hey - look what I found!"... but I didn't do much else with it.

Fast forward five years and two computers later.  I picked up genealogy as a hobby again.  This time, I was far more conscious of approaching it as actual research because I wanted to resolve some long standing questions in a couple of my lines of ancestry.  I was careful about making sure what I gathered was properly sourced and making sure anything I sent out had my information on it and all of the finite details that ensure that genealogy remains accurate.  As I realized the breadth of data I'd be collecting, storing and organizing, I realized I'd need software to do it.  And so I started doing genealogy software comparisons.  And by comparison, what I really mean is tragically crash testing my ancestry against meager feature sets with the assistance of copious amounts of Tylenol to take the pain away.