Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Although I’m not at #RootsTech this year, I’ve found this the easiest one yet to feel a part of from afar. The live streaming is better than ever, and the Twitter feeds I follow include dozens of people in attendance who are doing a great job with live updates and links to blog posts about the event. On ...

Dates in genealogy are messy. Four years ago, I wrote a series of posts on some of the aspects of dates as defined by GEDCOM and some of the bad dates you see in GEDCOM files in the wild: Sort of a Date How About a Date? Out on a Bad Date In a recent post by on the RootsDev Google Group, Gary Stanley ...

Well, it took a little longer for me than the other prolific genealogical bloggers who I follow, but I’ve finally reached this milestone with this post. So a time to look back at the 1000 posts. My first post was on November 7, 2002. It was a short one just to get started. That was over 13 years ago and ...

My last post took a look at the SEX tag in GEDCOM and came up with a way to guess at it when it is not specified. Tamura Jones challenged me and thought that records that do not state the sex are rare. He asked how useful is trying to figure it out for other cases, and I should stop after my rule number 1. ...

I have come across a need to check out the SEX tag in GEDCOM. Some of the new DNA features I’m finishing up for the next version of Behold make important use of the sex of the individual. Determining autosomal, X, Y and mitochondrial DNA shares between two individuals is much less accurate when the sex of ...

It’s a new year. I was very happy to complete the tabulation of the GenSoftReviews Users Choice Awards for 2015 and send out the Press Release about it, which so far only James Tanner has posted about it (also here). Usually that takes me a full day to take the results, make up the new badges, and manually ...

Do you an amass everything you can that might be related to your genealogy research? You have books in your library. File cabinets full of articles and clippings. Closets with boxes of unsorted picture albums and scrapbooks with letters and ephemera. Videos still on VHS and super 8. You’ll get to it someday. ...

One thing missing that I am adding to the upcoming version 1.2 release of Behold is an indication of relationships between people. If there is one thing not easy to determine, it is how people are related to the main person (also called the proband). But just as importantly, once you know the relationship, ...

Unless you’re a genealogist that has your head in the sand the past few days, you would have heard the big news from Tuesday that Ancestry will be “retiring” its very popular Family Tree Maker desktop genealogy software. Ancestry has always marketed their software as “the #1 selling family history ...

It may be that the 72 talks on this #utpcruise from New Zealand to Australia are the most sessions possible to attend at a single genealogy conference ever. The cruise is a long one, 18 days, and the sessions are spread out comfortably, with none held during shore leave so everyone can enjoy the ports of call. ...