Legacy has a powerful search facility which operates using boolean logic. Often the way to obtain the desired result can be obscure as I realised when I wished to search for married women who had not been given an alternative name.

It is my practice to use AKA's for including the married surname of spouses and I wished to know how many I had forgotten to record in my files. This presents certain problems as it is not possible to search for blank AKA's as they don't exist until created by recording the name. Searching for those that have one and tagging these will still leave me with a massive number of names to search.

It is possible to find all married people and then all that remains is to minimise the list. One can also find those married to "unknowns", those who already have an AKA and, of course, those who are women. This should reduce the number to a manageable level - presuming, of course that one has been reasonably dedicated in entering them in the first place!

Now for the detail:

How to find women with no married surname

Go to: Search Tab>Find>Miscellaneous Searches and set the People who are married radio button, then click "Create List".
On the list page click "Options","Advance Tagging" and Tag the search list with, say, Tag 1.
Repeat but this time set the "People married to Unknown" radio button and (having ensured the previous list is cleared) apply Tag 2.
We now need to identify those women who already have an AKA. This is a little different. Go to Search>Find as before but then Detailed Search and enter the following details:

Look for Whom: Female
Where to Look: Alt Surname
What to look for: Not equal to
Leave this blank
Create the list and apply Tag 3

Now for the final stage!
Return to the Detail Search and proceed as follows:

Look for Whom: Female
Where to Look: Tag 1
What to look for: Equal to
What to look for: Tagged

Check the "Second Condition" and set the radio button "and" then:
Look for Whom: Female
Where to Look: Tag 2
What to look for: Equal to
What to look for: Untagged

Check the "Third Condition" and set the radio button "and" then:
Look for Whom: Female
Where to Look: Tag 3
What to look for: Equal to
What to look for: Untagged

Create the list and behold one has a list of the women who do not have their married surname included in the AKA's.

This search may omit a few people eg. those who already had an AKA before they married and those who have multiple husbands where only one has been recorded but these are likely to be few in number.

Whilst this is a specific example the techniques employed can be used in a variety of circumstances and hopefully will give others ideas of ways of proceeding.

This page was compiled for use with Legacy Version 6 and subsequently, in Legacy 7, one can search for "Spouses Surname" using the Detailed Search. However, because it illustrates many aspects of using the search functions I have decided to leave it in.

For all women, Legacy uses their maiden names as a means of identification. It is, therefore, time consuming to compile a list of places where they lived. Recently the occasion arose where the question was asked as to whether it was possible to print a list of eg. places of death for women using their married names.

As the method of doing this, and if there is another I can't think of it, involves using techniques not included in Legacy Search (1) I have included it as a separate item. But a quick piece of advice: Before searching marriage status check the MRINs to ensure that the single persons entered with an unknown partner actually should have a MRIN ie. they either are married or have children. If they shouldn't then delete the MRIN entry.

Married people can be found as in Legacy Search but the subsequent procedure is quite different as we need to find the married surname of the women concerned with events in a specific location. This search will find the married names (or at any rate the surnames of their husbands) of all the women who were either born, christened, died or buried in St Helens from the database.

To start we will list all the people who are married; Go to: Search Tab>Find>Miscellaneous Searches and set the People who are married radio button, then click "Create List".
On the list page click "Options","Advance Tagging" and Tag the search list with, say, Tag 1.
For the purposes of searching tombstones or local records there doesn't seem to be much point in eliminating those married to unknowns, particularly as by doing so we would eliminate those with multiple marriages and these we would have to put back!
We have to find next those who meet the event criterion of our choice. In our case any or all of the above events. For this we will use Search>Find>Query by Example.

Search 1

As can be seen in image "Search 1" in the main panel on the left hand side all the center buttons "Bef" have been checked and on the right all the "In". Note the date I have used is Before 2007 to cover the whole database spectrum and St Helens as place. Initially type these against "Birth" (It should be noted that if all are selected only those who fulfil all the criteria will be selected). Now check "Female" and "Clear List..." then click "Create List". Do not Tag at this stage.
Repeat Search>Find>Query by Example but enter the date and place against ""Chr". This time click the radio button alongside "Add to List" Create the list and repeat the last step for both died and buried.
On completion of the buried stage click Options>Advanced Tagging>Everyone in Search List and Tag 2

Now to Search>Find>Detailed Search

Look for Whom: Female
Where to Look: Tag 1
What to look for: Equal to
Tagged

Second Condition

AND

Look for Whom: Female
Where to Look: Tag 2
What to look for: Equal to
What to look for: Tagged

Check that "Clear the List" is checked and create the list. We are presented with a list of women who were either born, christened, died or buried in St Helens (or you would on my database!). Problem is we still have only the maiden names.

So, click "Print"

Search 2

Image "Search 2" shows the page with which we are presented, although the bottom part may be largely blank. Click the "Customise" button and on the pop-up screen, by using the button with 3 dots on "...", one finds a wide variety of fields to choose from - including up to 3 spouses. Select these and any others you may wish and providing one remembers to check the select buttons they can be printed as indicated on the image.

Finally we have the list of women we require together with the full names of their husbands