Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Dirk, I'm currently away at the Unlock the Past genealogy cruise. I'll check the issues you pointed out when I get back. Louis

Thank, Dirk. I've now fixed this in the article. I likely will change the double dates to 1 character when I implement Behold's own external file format. If and when I do, I'll try to remember to update this article.

Very likely! I missed that because GEDCOM 5.5.1 does not refer to "U" as "UNKNOWN" but as "Undetermined from available records and quite sure that it can’t be". GEDCOM 5.5 only allowed M=Male and F=Female and had size 7. It did not allow U or Unknown. But GEDCOM 5.4 allowed M=Male and F=Female and ...

cp: I have about 4 books on genealogy numbering in my library, including one by Richard Pence which Mark Forkham refers to. Like Mark, I'm not really enamored by any of the traditional numbering systems, especially when you are combining going up the tree and going down. Mark's is a good attempt, Thanks ...

Thanks for the ideas, Rob. I was thinking about using lower case for descendants and upper case for ancestors as you suggest. Instead of "?", I was thinking of Z and z. And that would be good for an extension of this notation. But my specific purpose for this notation is to identify the DNA relationship. For ...

Thank you for this Justin. Do you know if the system is documented and formalized anywhere, or is it an informal system you all use?. It is a bit different in goal because I'm aiming at DNA relationship mapping for the purpose of stating just blood relationships and the expected percentage of DNA shared, so ...

Actually, the bottom of: http://gcbias.org/2013/12/02/how-many-genomic-blocks-do-you-share-with-a-cousin/ gets into the sort of thing I would look for, and it describes the Poisson distribution of shared blocks in a genomic region. My stats background would allow me to do the calculations necessary. But ...

Rob: I was looking into possibly giving ranges of percentages. I did look for, but was unable to find any statistics about the random nature of how DNA combines. If I had some theoretical study that estimated the combinatorial probabilities, then I might be willing to include ranges using that. But I don't ...

Tony: Getting me to think again, aren't you. The purpose of this notation is to precisely define a known relationship between two people, so I wasn't thinking of determining the relationship from the DNA. However, the wonderful byproduct is that this notation could now make that possible. With the ...

I really like your ideas, Rob. I was originally thinking of maybe using a different letter, or a different color, or maybe bold text. But parenthesis is better because it can be transferred as raw text and has the advantage of being able to include both common ancestors if desired as in: XYX(XY)XY. I've now ...