Extracting IGI Data
Several years ago I purchased Legacy Family Tree for my family history record keeping. My decision was based not only on Legacy's features, but also because it used Microsoft Access as its database (Legacy's data files were "disguised" with an fdb rather than an mdb file name extension). I was comfortable with using Microsoft Access at that time so the first question that came to mind was: "Can I use Access to look at Legacy data in new and interesting ways beyond those envisioned by the developers of Legacy?" Like 99% of its competitors, Legacy has the ability to import GEDCOM files. The FamilySearch web site (http://www.familysearch.org) provides the ability to save the results of International Genealogical Index (IGI) searches to GEDCOM files. The process of selecting results for saving is a bit tedious but could be worthwhile, particularly if I could turn around and import the saved files into Legacy, then manipulate or at least examine the data using Microsoft Access. I was especially interested in looking at the data at a macro level to see whether I might discover new family relationships or connections. This post describes my use of Legacy Family Tree and Microsoft Access, but you may find other ways to accomplish this task. There are plenty of GEDCOM utilities on cyndlist.com, for example, that might allow you to extract the contents of GEDCOM files into Microsoft Excel and use the latter application for your own analysis. I'm somewhat technically inclined and decided, at least initially, to let Legacy Family Tree do the heavy lifting of parsing and loading GEDCOM files. In a future article, I may try to explain how to bypass Legacy Family Tree completely and use custom program code to decipher and extract the contents of IGI-specific GEDCOM files. If possible, I'll use Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel, both of which have support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming. In a nutshell, the process involves exporting GEDCOM data from the International Genealogical Index and importing it into Legacy:
The steps to accomplish the above are a little too involved to cover in one post, so you'll have to check back here to see additional posts related to this topic.
Searching and Saving IGI Records
The very first step in the process is to visit www.familysearch.org. Select "Advanced Search" under the "Search Records" menu, then click on "International Genealogical Index" on the left. I can't guarantee that the pages comprising the familysearch site will remain unchanged, but I hope you'll be able to find your way.
Enter the Last Name of interest and any other search criteria. In my case, I was interested in potential ancestors who lived in the English county of Yorkshire. Once you've entered your criteria, click the Search button.
Your results, if any, will be displayed as a list with a check box next to each item. When I ran a search for this blog post, each results page contained 200 records. Unfortunately, only 50 records can be selected at one time for download in GEDCOM format. If you're interested in hundreds of records, then you can expect to take some time to save all of your search results into separate GEDCOM files of 50 records each. For example, to save 200 records from a results page, you will need to download 4 files of 50 records each. You'll have to keep track of which records you've already downloaded to avoid duplicating your efforts. Note: later blogs on this topic will include information about how to remove duplicates from your Legacy data file, so it's not too big a deal if the contents of some of your downloaded files overlap.
Check mark the Prepare selected records for download hyperlink and follow the instructions. Give meaningful names to each of the GEDCOM files that you download and take note of their location on your computer. You will need to access these files when you later reference them for importing into Legacy Family Tree.
Importing GEDCOM Files into Legacy
After launching Legacy Family Tree (version 7.x was used during the writing of this blog post), first create a new Legacy Family Tree database. Once you've created a database, click on the File menu and choose Import From, then GEDCOM File... from the resulting sub-menu. Repeat the import procedure for each of the GEDCOM files you downloaded from the FamilySearch web site.
Exit Legacy Family Tree. Open the folder where you created the new Legacy database. Make a copy of this database by first selecting it via a single click, then right-click and select Copy from the resulting popup menu. Click anywhere in the folder window where the new Legacy database is located. Right-click and select Paste from the resulting popup menu. Rename the copy by removing Copy of from the file name and by changing the 3-letter file extension from fdb to mdb.
It is extremely important that you make a copy of the fdb file. You cannot expect the vendor to help you (nor should you request help) if you alter your fdb file and create a problem. Always work on a copy.
You should now be able to open the newly copied file with the mdb 3-letter extension using Microsoft Access. In preparing this article, I used Microsoft Office Access 2007 although earlier versions as far back as Microsoft Access 2000 should work.
If I write another article on this topic, it'll describe how to open your Legacy database using Microsoft Access and how to clean up the newly imported IGI data. In the meantime, here's a visual representation of a portion of a Microsoft Access query that can be used to display the imported Legacy Family Tree data:
Last updated April 12, 2010 8:33:05 AM
