First, a general observation about Legacy's note fields: The present system for bolding or italicizing words or phrases is extremely awkward, as I think everyone agrees. (And centering lines, enlarging the font size, etc., seem to be out of the question.) I understand that the difficulty lies in exporting formatted texts to Gedcom files. But surely it would be possible to incorporate an RTF editor in Legacy and then simply strip formatting from notes when exporting?
Then there is the problem of searching notes. My impression is that it's not possible to do a general search; instead you have to specify which fields you wish to search. If I do a search in event-notes, Legacy merely produces a list of names of individuals, and it is then up to me to examine each note field of each person before I can locate the note I am looking for.
Finally, there is the problem -- which you and others have commented on -- that research notes have to be attached to individuals. Sometimes that just doesn't work. If I take notes on, say, the history of a town in which many of my ancestors lived, to whom do I attach this note?
I suppose I could learn to live with the notion of keeping certain kinds of genealogical notes in OneNote, but it is difficult to attach them to a Legacy file because of the peculiarities of OneNote's file structure. I could certainly create a series of small text files (created in a word-processor) that could be easily attached to legacy, but having a lot of short files not easily searched would represent, for me at least, a return to the unhappy past.
Let me emphasize again that I use Legacy regularly, and always with great pleasure. It's a wonderful program for developing family trees; it's less wonderful for the kind of ordinary note-taking that one has to do in any sort of historical investigation.
Bill Peterson
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Rob Weiss wrote:
Hi Bill,
A thought provoking post (for me at least!) I like the structure of the notes in Legacy, and find the main limitation is the lack of formatting. My understanding is that the General Note is intended for the Personal History function and I use it as such. Given that so much of Legacy's functionality focuses on Events, it seems logical to attach notes to specific events, and to sources supporting those events.
However, I've never envisaged that one would take notes directly into Legacy. Is that what you had in mind? It seems to me, at least based on my own limited note taking, say of an interview, or researching a reference, that my notes are initially too unstructured to be entered directly into Legacy, or any database. They may span multiple individuals, or multiple events, or may be purely conjectural, and so on. So I take the notes externally and then re-structure them and copy and paste paragpraphs into the right place within Legacy. One Note sounds interesting for this note taking role, and I'll investigate it, but I'm not clear how something like this would fit inside Legacy.
I guess it's the Research notes area that Legacy is weakest on. A Research Note attached to Marriages would be a useful addition, as has been suggested before. I keep my "raw" notes attached to the relevant To-Do item which I try to use as a research log. This works ok, but I have to copy and paste bits into relevant notes for individuals.
I'd be interested to hear further how you'd envisage improving Legacy's notes structure to support note taking. I suspect I'm missing something!
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