Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been enjoying doing some research with my wife’s cousin Terry Lasky on one branch of their common families. Terry has got several dozen of his relatives on that side of the family to do DNA tests. One aspect of what we are doing led to Jennifer Mendelsohn suggesting ...

Lots has been happening on the DNA analysis front in the past few months. Lots of very divergent opinions on a whole bunch of issues. Here are my opinions. You are free to agree or disagree, but these are mine. AncestryDNA Ancestry has had performance issues. Couldn’t they have been more honest to ...

Have you heard the big hubbub going on in genetic genealogy circles?  Ancestry will be dropping your 6 and 7 cM matches from your match list. In my case, I have 192,306 DNA matches at Ancestry. Of those, 54,498 matches are below 8 cM meaning Ancestry will drop over 28% of the the people on my ...

A very exciting day for me today, as most of you reading this will relate to. A second cousin of mine who I know showed up on my 23andMe match list. She matched me with 3.1% = 234 cM on 19 segments, which is exactly where she should be according to The Shared cM Project tool. I have 9 other cousins who have ...

In just over a week, on Tuesday July 14, 2020 at 8:00 pm EDT, I’ll be giving a live online talk for the Virtual Genealogical Association @VirtualGenAssoc   The description of my talk is: Presenter Louis Kessler explains those mysterious files that we download from DNA testing companies, helps us to ...

I’ve written over 1100 genealogy-related blog posts since I started blogging in 2002. But very rarely have I written about my own genealogy research. It’s actually going okay now. This blog was started to document the development and progress of my software program Behold, that I’m building to assist me ...

I have now taken 5 DNA microarray (chip) tests with Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, Ancestry DNA, MyHeritage DNA and Living DNA. I have also taken two Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) tests with Dante Labs, one short-reads and one long-reads. I analyzed the accuracy of these tests by comparing individual SNP values in ...

Kevin Borland is the author of Borland Genetics, a fantastic site where you can upload your Raw DNA data, match to others, and use tools to reassemble your ancestors’ DNA. I very recently wrote a blog post about Kevin’s site. Kevin also has a blog in which he has been posting very interesting articles, ...

On Facebook, I was delivered a sponsored ad for getting health reports from your DNA raw data at a 55% discount from a company called Xcode Life. @xcode_ls I’ve always been much more interested in DNA for genealogical purposes than for health, but I had never heard of this company and it sounded ...

There’s another website I recommend you upload your DNA raw data to called Borland Genetics. See this video: Introducing Borland Genetics Web Tools In a way, Borland Genetics is similar to GEDmatch in that they accept uploads of raw data and don’t do their own testing. Once uploaded, you can then see ...