Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Between 2012 and 2018, I attended 11 international genealogy conferences.

They included:

• 3 times RootsTech in Salt Lake City (2012, 2014 and 2017)
• 2 Unlock the Past genealogy cruises around Australia and New Zealand (2013 and 2016)
• the Geanovium genealogy technology conference in Leiden, the Netherlands (2014)
• the Ontario Genealogy Society conference in Toronto (2016)
• the IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies) conference in Disney World, Florida (2017)
• the Great Canadian Genealogical Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia (2017)
• the Family Tree DNA Genetic Genealogy Conference in Houston (2017)
• the KDGS (Kelowna District Genealogical Society) conference in Kelowna, British Columbia in 2018.

I was a speaker at all these conferences. Each one was unique and wonderful in its own way. Meeting in person with genealogy friends who until then I had only known online was the highlight of each. And many of these friends attended several of these conferences.

There are 3 more conferences that I had made plans to go to and was looking forward to. I wish I could have gone to these as well.

1. The Manitoba Genealogy Society’s 1st Provincial Conference.

The MGS is my home province’s genealogy society. I have spoken at a few local meetings for them before, but this was going to have been their first attempt at a bigger event of maybe 400 attendees. It was going to have taken place from June 12 to 14, 2020 in Winnipeg where I live.

I was scheduled to speak at the event and I know that Diahan Southard was being brought in as the keynote speaker. I was looking forward to meeting Diahan and spending time with her, and was hoping that I could arrange to pick her up at the airport and wine and dine her a bit.

Unfortunately, on November 8, 2019, the MGS announced that they had to cancel the Conference. As it turns out, the Conference likely would have been cancelled the next year anyway due to Covid.

2. The MyHeritage LIVE 2020 conference.

In December 2019, MyHeritage announced its 3rd MyHeritage LIVE conference. The previous two were held in Oslo, Norway in 2018 and in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2019.

But this one would be special because it was to be held in Tel Aviv, Israel. Since that’s where the MyHeritage headquarters is, what it means is that many more of their staff would be able to participate, and attendees would be able to visit the company offices.

I submitted my application to be a speaker. I had never been to Israel myself and my wife and I were looking forward to touring the country for two weeks before or after the conference.

Alas this conference was a casualty of Covid.

I’m hoping now that the major Covid worries seem to have passed, that MyHeritage will resurrect their own MyHeritage LIVE conferences and maybe one day when the situation in Israel is better resolved, they will announce a conference in Israel, and I will be sure to plan to attend.

3. The Find Your Roots River Cruise

This one was planned in 2022, scheduled for 2024 with the hope that Covid worries would by then be no more. It was to have been a genealogy European river cruise with headliners Blaine Bettinger and Judy Russell.

They were to be the only speakers, so for once I’d be able to just enjoy Blaine and Judy’s talks and not have any obligations. My wife and I were very much looking forward to this cruise and spending time with a shipfull of genealogy enthusiasts.

I wrote about this cruise in a 2022 blog post: Genealogy River Cruising in 2024

Unfortunately, this cruise was cancelled in 2023 as they did not attract enough people to fill the ship, with the price of the cruise being fairly high.

The Future

I’m not sure how many more conferences I will attend in person. Since Covid, so much happens virtually now. But if there is something new and special, or a person I need to meet, then I’ll certainly consider going.

What genealogy conferences do you wish you could have gone to?

As I work hard to finish up what is in the soon to be released Behold 1.999, there was another notation I needed to devise.

Those of you who have worked with WikiTree will be aware of their introduction of connection counts. It was a couple of years ago when the imagineers at WikiTree came up with the concept of a “Connection Count at 7 Degrees” (CC7) to be an indicator of how well-connected your family is. I wrote an article about this last year:  What’s Your CC7?

WikiTree promotes challenges to increase your CC7, which is the number of people you connect with in 7 steps or less.

Defining a Connection

A connection as defined by WikiTree is the shortest number of steps between two people, where a step is one of:

• A parent (father or mother)
• A child (son or daughter)
• A sibling (brother or sister)
• A spouse (husband or wife)

So your grandfather’s sister would be 3 steps: 

• parent – father – sister

Your brother-in-law would be 2 steps:

• sister – husband, or
• wife – brother

since the term brother-in-law can be either.

The Connection Count (CC) is the lowest number of steps it will take you to go from one person to another. I find it remarkable that WikiTree can do all that calculation and tell me that the lowest number of connections I have with Kevin Bacon is 20 and with Queen Elizabeth is 17. And then it provides the steps:

There are a few important things to note about the connections:

1. The shortest connection need not be as a relative. e.g. If your 3rd cousin married your sister, then the CC is 2, through your sister, rather than the 7 steps for 3rd cousins.
2. The sibling step is effectively a shortcut that takes 1 step, instead of going parent – child (2 steps) to get to a full or half sibling, The BGRN notation (see below) always counts siblings as 2 steps but for connection counts, a sibling is just 1 step.

The whole idea of working on improving your CC7 is that it gets you to research some of the close families of those related to you through marriage. These people would be included in what they call FAN (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) research.

Adding Connection Counts to Behold

I don’t know of any genealogy program other than WikiTree that gives you connection counts. I think it is a very interesting number, and people with GEDCOM files might want to know about them. So I have decided to add them into this upcoming release of Behold.

I will describe my implementation of CCs in a future blog post.

Connection Count Relationship Notation (CCRN)

But what is important right now for this article, is to define a notation that can concisely define a specific connection.

The diagram earlier on this page is an older diagram that WikiTree uses. In effect, it tells me that the connection is: sister – son – wife – mother – father – mother – father – father – father – father - father –father – brother – son – son – son – son – daughter – daughter – son. 

To me, that’s a bit verbose. Something with one letter per connection would be preferable. A 20 step connection then would be exactly 20 characters long.

We need letters for:   Parent, Father, Mother, Child, Son, Daughter, Sibling, Brother, Sister, Spouse, Husband, and Wife.

Parent, Child, Sibling and Spouse are needed in case we don’t know the sex of that particular person in the line.

We can’t use just the first letters since Son, Sibling, Sister and Spouse all start with S.

Also, there is a similar notation, Behold’s Genetic Relationship Notation (BGRN) that I came up with in 2018 that I am using in Behold to define relationships. I would like the two to be compatible.

So this is what I’ve decided on:

• F = father
• M = mother
• P = parent of unknown sex
• S = son
• D = daughter
• C = child of unknown sex
• h = husband
• w = wife
• k = spouse of unknown sex

These are already in BGRN. Note that BGRN uses uppercase letters for biological relations and lowercase for non-biological (in this case marital) relations. This makes it easy to see if a relationship is biological or not.

So now I just need to add brother, sister and sibling, as follows:

• B = brother
• Z = sister
• G = sibling of unknown sex

“S” is already used for son, and BGRN uses T for twin and R for pair of parents, and the notation should not use vowels or words (possibly bad ones) might inadvertently be formed. So Z and G will have to do, unless someone has a better idea. Z isn’t that bad, because you can think: “Zister”.

Using this notation, the CCRN for my connection with Kevin Bacon is:

ZSwMFMFFFFFFBSSSSDDS

and it’s fairly easy to interpret that to be:  My sister’s son’s wife’s mother’s father’s mother’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s brother’s son’s son’s son’s son’s daughter’s daughter’s son is Kevin Bacon.

This is exactly 20 characters long meaning the connection count is 20, and since it contains a lowercase letter, I know the connection is not biological.

Followup

I realized this the next day when I started coding the CC into Behold, that I needed to distinguish biological from non-biological connections as well, e.g. for adoptions, as I do in my BGRN notation.

So add these to the list of possible codes:

• f = father, non-biological but legal
• m = mother, non-biological but legal
• p = parent of unknown sex, non-biological but legal
• s = son, non-biological but legal
• d = daughter, non-biological but legal
• c = child of unknown sex, non-biological but legal
• b = brother, non-biological but legal
• z = sister, non-biological but legal
• g = sibling of unknown sex, non-biological but legal

I originally was going to use “L” for sibling, until I realized that the lowercase “l” is difficult to distinguish as an “L” and is difficult to notice. Of course we would prefer “S” for sibling, but “S” is taken for son, so “G” and “g” will have to do.

More soon.

One of the best reasons to have your family tree on one of the major online sites MyHeritage, Ancestry or FamilySearch, is because of their record matching systems. They will go out and find records for the individuals in your tree from among the billions of records in their collections and make them available to you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go and specifically seek out records that you need. Not all records are online, and there are a lot of records that are not indexed or transcribed incorrectly so that no automated system will find for you. But what you get from record matches are all the straightforward records that you’d never be able to find for yourself in your lifetime. These record matches will also include some record collections that you never would have thought to look at. Automated record matching is such an innovation, that I would go so far as to say it has revolutionized genealogy.

Record Matches on MyHeritage

I last used a desktop program to record my genealogy in 1994. The program I was using at the time was Reunion for Windows. I had at that point connected 1361 people to my family. Over the next 20 years, I worked on my program Behold, expecting it to become the program I would use to be the program I would use to record my family.

But in 2017, the new trend of online record collections and record matching systems became an irresistible draw for me. I opened an account at MyHeritage, initially loaded my tree using a GEDCOM file, and started working on my tree there. Over the next six years, I was fortunate to obtain hundreds of Romanian and Russian records about my relatives in the 1800’s and greatly expanded my ancestry. Meanwhile, the MyHeritage record matches were so valuable to help me work down from my ancestors and discover 3rd, 4th and 5th cousins that I would never have found otherwise.

Currently, I have 8 trees at MyHeritage. My main tree is for my and my wife’s families as well as a place-to-place study and now contains 15,353 people. I have 7 other trees for in-laws and friends that have another 3,339 people. Here’s a bit of the history that I kept about the growth of my family trees at MyHeritage and the number of Record Matches that I’ve confirmed and added to my tree.

With MyHeritage, I try to keep up to all the record match suggestions it supplies. Every few weeks, I might get several hundred to several thousand new record matches to look through and process by either confirming or rejecting each one.

The source to person ratio is a metric that I remember Randy Seaver blogging about. In 2019 Randy reported a ratio of 1.94 from his RootsMagic program. I wonder how much he has raised his ratio since then. It’s important to try to ensure your tree has supporting records, and the ratio is a good way to check that you’re going in the right direction. I attribute the growth of my ratio primarily due to the growth of new record collections at MyHeritage.

MyHeritage’s Discovery Settings

When you look at your record matches at MyHeritage, there is a small “cog” on the page that you may never have noticed.

If you click on the “cog”, it brings up this window:

I don’t know when MyHeritage added this feature. I didn’t notice that the “cog” was there until sometime last year. The Introduction to Record Matches article by MyHeritage describes the “Confidence Scores” in more detail. The Discovery Settings allow you to set the minimum level of confidence of the record matches that you are given. You can also select only structured records, or only text records if you want.

The confidence level has 11 settings. From zero (lowest confidence) with increments of  0.5 up to 5 (highest confidence). The default is 0.5 which includes almost all the record Matches that are found. Increasing the Confidence Level will reduce the number of Record Matches you are presented with.

I tested most of the confidence levels on my own matches. Below are the numbers of record matches that MyHeritage gives me at each confidence setting. MH sometimes refers to a “Collection” as a “Source”.

MyHeritage currently has 7466 different collections. Only 485 of those give me record matches at confidence setting 0 or higher.  Confidence setting 5 only gives me record matches from 107 collections.

These are the MyHeritage collections that give me the most record matches at confidence level 0:

Note that MyHeritage classifies Geni, FamilySearch and Filae matches as structured record matches. These are actually family tree sites, and genealogists know that other people’s family trees (especially unsourced ones) are not to be trusted until verified with records.

MyHeritage also finds matches with its own member’s family trees. It keeps those separate into what it calls “Smart Matches”. I have  23,678 smart matches with 5,124 trees at MyHeritage. Those are great for clues and really help put families together. MyHeritage is correct not to call those “records”. But IMHO I think MyHeritage should change Geni, FamilySearch and Filae matches to also be smart matches.

Confirming and Rejecting Record Matches

When I learned about the Discovery Settings last year, I changed my confidence setting from 0.5 to 0 and learned that I had 12,000 more matches to review. I wondered if anything with zero confidence was worthwhile spending the time on.

So I spent a few weeks reviewing 6054 of these matches. I confirmed only 2558 of them (42%) and rejected the rest (58%).

Technically, a confirmation of a match should mean that this record does indeed pertain to the person that the match says it pertains to. A rejection should mean that it is not the correct person. What I do is also reject records for the correct person if they are duplicates of another record. I only keep one. For example, the same newspaper article might be printed on consecutive days or in different newspapers.

The one person in my tree who has the most record matches is the astronaut Judith Resnik who was killed in the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Needless to say, there were many articles written and the initial articles were reprinted in newspapers everywhere. I have 1208 record matches for Judith and only confirmed 30 of them (2%), rejecting the rest (98%).

So I was wondering if the confidence levels that MyHeritage assigns to records correspond somewhat to the percentage that I have rejected. I downloaded some statistics from my matches and came up with this table:

What this says is that MyHeritage does quite well in providing relevant structured record matches, requiring rejection less than 20% of the time with a confidence setting of 0.5 or more. The Free Text records however are much less reliable, with confidence level 0 almost always being rejected.

Conclusion

There’s nothing like MyHeritage record matches to provide you with facts and sources you need to expand your family tree. I enjoy spending the the hours necessary to review new matches whenever they appear for me. It definitely is worth your time doing this!

If you haven’t already, check out the MyHeritage Discovery Settings. You may want to increase the confidence level or only work with structured records if you have too many pending matches. Or you may want to try decreasing the confidence level to 0 and see all the suggestions that MyHeritage has to offer. The choice is yours.

Followup June 5.

Well it took about 10 weeks, but I have now cleared out (either accepted or rejected) all the remaining record matches and any new record or smart matches that appeared since 10 weeks ago.

This brings me up to 36,955 confirmed record matches plus 25,401 confirmed smart matches for the 19,443 people in my 8 MyHeritage trees. That increases my record match ratio from 1.83 to 1.90. When I add the 12,916 rejected record matches and 215 rejected smart matches, that yields a total 75,487 matches that MyHeritage has provided me, with 83% of them accepted.

My goal now is to keep up with the new matches as they come in, so that I stay at zero pending matches. Doing so always feels good, just like clearing out your e-mail inbox, or cleaning off your desk.