If you are making printed genealogy reports for a family member or family reunions, this gives you great control over the display options for documents and photos in your database.
It works in the other direction, too, if you update a record in the RootsMagic program, that change will automatically be transmitted to Ancestry the next time you connect using the TreeShare option. This includes automatic linking and downloading of the document images themselves, so it’s a great way to leverage the research power of while keeping an off-line copy of your research. As you do more research involving document images retrieved from the Ancestry repositories, like Census lists, passenger lists, or naturalization documents, you can periodically download them to your RootsMagic database by using the program’s “TreeShare” module. You can upload a tree you create in RootsMagic directly from the program to, including images and document attachments-and you can keep the two trees synchronized automatically. The current version interfaces directly with and with the LDS Church’s database.
If you purchase version 7, the current version ($29.95), you get a free license key for the forthcoming version 8, expected early in 2020.
Because LFT is affiliated with a competing genealogy site,, its links focus on that platform, and downloading from Ancestry is a mult-istep manual process that doesn’t capture the documents themselves.įortunately, the latest version of RootsMagic ( ) solves that problem. That could be literally thousands of files.įor years, I’ve been very pleased with the functionality of Legacy Family Tree ( ), still an excellent genealogy program that has just about everything you need to do professional quality genealogy research-except for a direct link to. Using the site’s tools, you would need to download each document image manually. But if you ever decide to stop paying for the subscription, you’ll lose access to all the documents like passenger ship lists, citizenship petitions, and others that you may have linked to people in your tree.Īncestry doesn’t provide a simple way for you to download all the documents you uncover that connect to your family. If you use the popular site and pay an annual fee for the subscription, you have full access to all the research you compile. That means having a well-designed genealogy software program. But I think there are some very good arguments for maintaining your master genealogical research in a local file system on your computer, where you control it. I’m going to be giving a talk on Jewish genealogy at Temple Emanuel in Cherry Hill on March 1 as part of a new adult education series, so I wanted to get myself up to date on the latest capabilities.īecause so many people are uploading family trees and maintaining them directly on the web using sites like these, using computer-based software for genealogy research is almost a lost art. It’s been years since we looked at genealogical research software and associated web resources, and it’s safe to say it’s a whole new world out there for people researching their family trees.