Legacy - Adding events

With grateful thanks to Macbev who taught me about the repeat button

It is tempting at first just to add information about a person in the note field, but this soon becomes unwieldy, it is far better to use “Events”

For example, you may have found a family on a census and you want to enter the details for say the husband, wife and a couple of children. Start off by opening up the card for the husband and click on add event. When the event card opens up, I put say 1861 census on the top line The second line is Description, this is where I put the RG or HO source number. I always record it in case I can’t find the census again, especially if the name has been mis transcribed etc. It is really supposed to go onto some source clipboard, but I am happy to have it in description. The next line is date, some people put the census day here, The next line is place, I put the full address here In the notes box below, I write a nice description, such as “The family consists of Fred Bloggs age 32, Ag lab, wife Mary….. and so on. I do it nicely because it comes out better when you do a book report. When it is all filled in, click on save

To add the same details for the wife, open up her card, then click on add event, so the blank event card opens. If you look down the right hand side, you will see “Repeat”. Just click on that and magically 1861 census appears in the top line, click repeat again and the description line fills in, keep clicking and everything including the notes appears as if by magic. Just close and do the same again for each of the children. It is brilliantly quick to enter the event for a whole family, no matter how many children there are.

The only disadvantage of using one description for the family and just repeating it for everyone is when you come to do a book report. The generic description of “The family consists of Fred Bloggs age 32, Ag lab, wife Mary” ends up being repeated for each family member. If this matters, then once you enter the basic description for each family member, go to each one in turn and alter the description slightly. For instance for a child alter it to say something like He is age 8 living with his parents Fred Bloggs…. The fact that the basic description is there makes it easier to alter that rather than typing in the whole thing from scratch for each family member.