Legacy Family Tree announces version 7.4 with New FamilySearch connection

In an announcement dated January 5, 2009, Millenia's Legacy Family Tree version 7.4 received official certification from FamilySearch, and is now listed as an official Certified Product at http://www.familysearch.org/eng/affiliates/index.html. Legacy is certified in the following categories: Access, Ordinance Status, Print.

As a long time Legacy user, I have been interested in these new developments. For many months now, the Mesa Regional Family History Center has been offering classes in Ohana Software's FamilyInsight, Ancestral Quest 12.1, RootMagic 4 and Legacy Family Tree. The Legacy classes have been offered in anticipation that the program would become an official certified product. I have been teaching a lot of these classes and see advantages and disadvantages in each of the programs. I am very interested to see how Legacy Family Tree compares to the programs that already offer New FamilySearch connectivity. All three of the competing programs have been out for several months and have already gone through a number of upgrades. You would hope that Legacy Family Tree would have benefited from the experience of the other programs.

I run Legacy Version 7.0.0.109 on my iMac with Parallels Desktop using Microsoft Windows 7. Except for some initial difficulty in loading the program, I have had no trouble with running both the Macintosh and Windows 7 functions at the same time. As soon as the program is available I will be reviewing and comparing all three of the standalone programs. FamilyInsight is really designed as an add-on to Personal Ancestral File and has no file storage capabilities of its own, so it isn't really fair to compare it to the other programs.

It will be also interesting to see how the program all evolve, including the ongoing changes to New FamilySearch. Legacy Family Tree announced that Version 7.4 would have the following features:

Version 7.4 received official certification from FamilySearch in the following categories: Access, Print, and Ordinance Status. This will allow you to:

• Match your Legacy individuals with FamilySearch individuals
• Combine potential duplicates that exist at FamilySearch
• View the real-time ordinance status of individuals

The complete synchronization functions are apparently not going to be available until Version 7.5 is release in a few weeks (let's hope that it doesn't go too much longer).

Legacy Family Tree has also created a special web site devoted to keep users updated on this release. At www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/fs.asp, they will publish the very latest information.