For those who might be interested, I found the following in a newsletter:
- Legacy 3.0 Is Now Free
The Millennia Corporation made an announcement this week that
should interest a lot of genealogists: their excellent Windows
genealogy program, Legacy 3.0, is now available free of charge.
Legacy is one of the better genealogy products available and has
had a retail price of $49.95 (U.S. funds). In the May 10, 2000
edition of this newsletter, I wrote, "Legacy has always been one
of my favorite genealogy programs since the first day that I saw
it in operation. The new version didn't let me down; it improves
on an already top-notch program. If you are thinking about moving
up to a more powerful genealogy program, I would suggest that you
consider Legacy 3.0."
Now it will be very easy to "consider" Legacy 3.0 since you can
download it online at no charge. You also can obtain it on CD-ROM
disk, although Millennia Corporation will charge a few dollars for
the disk and postage.
Millennia first released Legacy over two and a half years ago.
Since that time it has grown to be one of the more popular
genealogy programs in the market today, even with a retail price
of about fifty dollars. "Today's announcement marks a big change
in the distribution of the product," said David Berdan, president
of Millennia. "We expect a huge increase in our user base in the
near future. We also have plans for many new products and
features."
It's surprising to see a program this powerful available for free.
How will Millennia make money? By offering a new, enhanced version
for $19.95. The company apparently expects that you will try the
free program and will love it. They probably expect a lot of
people will then pay the extra money to add even more
functionality. I believe the Gillette Corporation used to do
something similar with razors: they gave the relatively expensive
razors away free and then made millions of dollars selling razor
blades to fit the razors.
It might be easy to think that the free version of Legacy is a
"dummied down" edition. Not true. It is the same as the full
commercial version of Legacy 3.0 that Millennia Corporation was
selling for $49.95 until this week. The new $19.95 version appears
to be what I would call "version 4.0" although the Millennia
Corporation prefers to call it the "Deluxe Edition."
The free version of Legacy 3.0 includes the following:
* Easy data entry
* Unlimited file size
* To Do List and Correspondence Log
* Web Page Creation
* IntelliMerge, one of the nicest implementations I have seen
for merging two databases together
* A powerful Report and Book generator
* An excellent method for recording source citations
* Multiple family files in split screens
* GEDCOM import and export
* Spell Checking
* Search and Replace
* Much, much more
The Deluxe Edition, available for $19.95, adds the following:
* It can produce PDF files from previewed reports. These can be
sent by email and read in the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe.
* Compare Two Files for Duplicates allows you to see if there
are individuals or lines in another file that you might want
to import.
* The new Advanced Sourcing features lets you assign sources to
a group of individuals or marriages at one time. You can
select the fields to be sourced.
* Many reports can now include a Location Index showing on what
pages each location is used.
* A new Relationship Calculator lets you see every way any two
people are related. You can also print nice Relationship
Charts with colored boxes and text.
* When doing Merges you can specify any pair of individuals as
being "Not Duplicates." Oftentimes you may have felt like you
were wearing out the Skip To Next button as you came upon
pairs of individuals you knew were not duplicates but had
similar names and information. Now you can mark these pairs as
Not Duplicates so they don't continually show up in subsequent
merge sessions.
* There is a new Last Report button on the main screen that lets
you quickly go to the last report screen you used.
* You can now Renumber RINs and MRINs (Record and Marriage
Record Individual Numbers). You can renumber specific
individuals or marriages as well as groups of records.
* You can now Reuse Deleted RINs and MRINs when adding new
records and importing.
* You can select the color of boxes on Ancestor, Descendant and
Pedigree Charts.
Both the free version and the Deluxe version of Legacy 3.0 require
the following: a Pentium class computer with a minimum of 16
megabytes of memory (32 megabytes or more recommended), 35
megabytes of available hard disk space, Windows 95, 98, 2000, Me
or NT.
If you are unhappy with your present genealogy software, or if you
would like to trade up to a free program that probably is more
powerful than what you are using today, I would suggest you take
Legacy 3.0 for a test drive. You may like it better than what you
have been using, even if you paid a lot of money for your current
software. To read my earlier review of Legacy version 3.0, go to:
http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/eastman/1194.asp
To obtain more information about the new free offer or to download
the software, go to:
http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/.