Elizabeth, Decided I'd throw in my tuppence worth! I find the Narrative reports in Legacy do an admiral job in painting a biographical sketch of each family. My only complaint is that without expensive pdf software it is quite difficult to manipulate the output if you do want to make changes, such as removing duplicate information when there are 'blended' families involved. My solution to that dilemma is to learn to live with the repeated info. To get the reports to read as a real narrative takes a bit of work on constructing event sentences. I don't use a single generic sentence definition. And where I have multiple examples of similar information, such as different occupations I generally add the earliest one with the event sentence, but then use notes in that definition to describe occupations that followed. Same for Census or electoral roll details, which I do as an event rather than just a source. If, for instance much of the details are the same from year to year I use the notes to indicate such. Censuses are a little different because there are usually major changes over the ten year periods so I tend to do each one separately. But for electoral rolls, which can remain the same for several years I tend to enter the earliest with all details, then tell the rest of the 'story' in notes for following years where the place of residence and occupation are the same. I also make note of who else was living at the same address each year. As for details which relate to the whole family I add these as marriage events. Works well when you tend to create descendant reports as the families are always grouped together. Does create a bit of a problem if you want to start the report from anyone other than the earliest known ancestor as the Censuses will only be picked up in the year the descendant first appeared on a Census in their own right. But it works for me as I almost exclusively create reports starting from earliest known ancestor. If you want to have a look at an example of my descendant narrative reports to see what the output is like got to http://branchesandtwigs.wikispaces.com/, scroll down the left hand side till you come to the links for Descendant of ...., click on any of those to see a page with a descendant report on it (called Descendants of xyz.pdf). Some are more extensive than others - SULLIVAN or LORING have lots of events.
Cheers Jan -----Original Message----- From: Ron Ferguson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 21 September 2011 18:21 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] book production Elizabeth, The thing to remember is that Legacy is a program for the storage and retrieval of data, and has some options for the production of reports. It is *not* a word processor, and in my opinion hopefully never will be. To do as you wish you really do need to be looking at word processors such as Word or the free OpenOffice.org and Libre Office. You can save your Legacy data as a .rtf file and upload into any of these, which have the capacity for editing as you suggest. Ron Ferguson http://www.fergys.co.uk/ From: elizabeth Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 6:34 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] Report for Family Reuion Syble, and group, I am also trying to create a book for my family and understand exactly what you are saying. There is ssoooooooo much repetition of information such as Events and Census data!!! I want my book to be more of a 'biographical sketch of each family', tying the whole family together rather than a long list of facts (Events, etc) but I have not figured out how this can be done. I have "lots and lots" of newspaper articles, obituaries, family stories, etc that I want included as part of the narrative, not entered as a long list of Events. And I want the census data to be for the whole family, not each person separately. Surely there must be folks on this list who have created narrative books for their families who might be able to help us........I hope so. 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 Follow Legacy on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LegacyFamilyTree) and on our blog (http://news.LegacyFamilyTree.com). To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
