The Millennia Corporation made an announcement this week that should interest a lot of genealogists: its 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 10 May 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 more than 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
  
• And 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 e-mail 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 who 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. Read my earlier review of Legacy version 3.0.

Click here to obtain more information about the new free offer or to download the software.