James Legacy is very good, perhaps unmatched, to organize material for reports, document fact related to known data (sources etc.), and it helps discipline users towards better scholarship. I wouldn't say it's useless, but it's certainly been comparatively poor support for doing research, as distinct from handling the product of such. Further, it has always served the genealogist better than the family historian. Research increasingly involves much that is tentative or speculative, plus gleanings from very large volumes of potential source data, often needing review and evanescent when sources change or vanish. Legacy doesn't cater for that, or help organize research material, and it's not a great environment to THINK in. Notably, there's no good provision to record the compiler's logic and factors supporting inference. It's worse for the historian, because there is little to support the morphology of the context of a genealogy's changing caste of characters - historical, economic etc.
I started by just using General and Research Notes for relevant thinking, filenames and snatches from web material, but that's inconvenient when working online without Legacy loaded and a pain to clean up if distributing material to family rather than another researcher. I've got several GBs of research material files on this machine alone, with numerous folders of files relevant to more than one individual and even to more than one genealogy. What is really needed is something perhaps with XML mapping as an integrated companion to Legacy and usable alone as a data organizer, quick reference and navigation aid (aide?). A simple and effective step in that direction is the use of the free "Tomboy Notes". That's a little program which is multiplatform and invokes trivially to provide note space for jottings to giant snips from page text, searchable, with notes groupable into "notebooks" and synchonizable between machines. Obviously, it's not integrated with Legacy, but if you mentally make Tomboy or some other character group a reserve word in Legacy, then Legacy's Search can find all instances, simplifying cleanout when needed, and the key word can be placed where it's useful in Legacy and followed immediately by the cut-and-pasted title of the related Tomboy note, which is then available as a fast index into that file system. Legacy does not need to be open for Tomboy data capture, or even on the same machine with synchronization, It's just a little housekeeping to update or place the links in Legacy later. Tomboy can be invoked while Legacy is running though, giving instant access to notes and, if file names or URLs are in a note, slower access beyond. Info and download from here or elsewhere - you need the Windows Installer version and are safest choosing the most recent stable one rather than a development beta. http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/ kb ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Cook" <[email protected]> (an aside to my Knight in shining armor thread) I am trying to determine the best way to utilize Legacy (if at all) in the uncertain situations - such as a family history claiming Knighthood in the ancestry. Seems to me there some choices: - Enter the people - ... - Do not enter the people, but make TODOs for further research Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
