I am in the processing of doing something that I never thought I would do — that is porting my genealogy database to a different software package. After using Legacy Family Tree since 2004, I have decided it’s worth the pain to switch to RootsMagic.
Don’t get me wrong — Legacy is a great program. But lately I have been feeling an ever growing disconnect between the features I want in a genealogy program and what Legacy provides. So I decided it was time to take another look at the competition to see if there was a better fit for me.
The first time that I took a close look at the competition was when Legacy V6 was released without the much anticipated “witness” feature which would have provided for shared events. We (the users) were told that the programmers wanted to include it, but it required too much “restructuring.” At that time I looked at RootsMagic as well as other products. My perception was that RM did not support tagging, and that was a Legacy feature that I did not want to give up. After evaluating the competition, I decided to stick with Legacy and hope shared events would be addressed in the next release.
Fast-forward about 7 years. Legacy is now on Version 7.5. It still doesn’t support shared events, and, as I blogged about before, it also doesn’t support shared source detail (citations). These 2 pet peeves, coupled with some other minor annoyances, caused me to really give RM a good look when I got the email about their Version 6 release. And the more I looked, the more I liked!
The more I looked into RM’s implementation of shared events – or as they call it, shared facts – the more I decided it was a must-have. First and foremost, this feature allows you to create, for example, a single census event/fact and have it attached to all the members of the household. As a software engineer who specialized in database design, I personally feel this implementation is much better than having multiple copies of the event – as Legacy would have you do. (Or my work-around which was to create the census event as a marriage event and basically ignore attaching it to the children.)
Additionally, shared facts allow for the capturing of relationships beyond spousal and parent/child. For example, a baptismal or christening fact can be shared with the godparents and even the officiating clergy. RM did an excellent job implementing shared facts in a very flexible and powerful way, including user-definable roles and sentence structures.
Sadly, RM does not support shared source citations, but shared facts are a step in the right direction.
And what about tagging – the lack of which stopped me from switching to RM all those years ago? I have found that the named groups give me about 80% of the functionality of tagging — and I can live with that. I am also liking the interface now that I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks.
On the other hand, there are certain things that Legacy has that I miss – like hovering the mouse over a child in the family view to see the spouse list and all the shortcut mouse clicks. But all in all, I think (hope) that I’ve made the right choice – for me, for now.
I am now going through the tedious process of cleaning up – changing the christening facts back to baptism, fixing up the place list, changing the census (family) fact to a shared census fact, etc. And then there’s sources.. That can of worms probably deserves a separate post!
I also went through this agonizing decision process within the last year. I also had been using LFT for several years and found the same problems you did. But I also went through an evaluation of The Master Genealogist to the point of migrating my database and trying it for a few months. I finally chose RootsMagic. Besides having an easy way of sharing of events/facts, RM also has some other advantages over LFT and TMG. One, not widely known, is the capability to hot link directories and files on your computer to individuals and their facts so one can open Explorer in Windows. Not all my data files are nor should they be included as media and etc. in reports, but it is very productive to be able to access them easily for reference. Unfortunately this capability in RM is not as robust as it could be, but it can be made to work. However, one of the most glaring deficiencies in RM at the moment is the inability to generate a name index in the Individual Summary style report. The names are not even marked in the RTF format for you to generate you own index. Hopefully someone will energize the RM magician to get this fixed. Still, all in all, RM is the best.
Thanks for the comment Joe! I will have to check out the hot-linking function. I haven’t looked at the reports in a lot of detail yet, so I haven’t run across the name index problem that you mentioned.
I had a pretty serious problem where RM linked some of the source detail records incorrectly when it imported the LFT database. Unfortunately I did not catch it right away. I was able to correct the source detail problem by doing an export/import on the LFT side and then importing the new LFT database into RM. Now I’m just trying to make sure the records I added and updated prior to discovering the problem are added to the “good” version of the RM database. I think I am just about there!