Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

When I was first learning about autosomal DNA analysis, just over a year ago, I was under the misconception that if three people triangulate on a segment, then that segment is IBD (Identical by Descent). A segment that is IBD is one that is passed down from a common ancestor. These are the segments you are ...

I’ve returned from Orlando after the week-long #IAJGS2017 (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) Conference on Jewish Genealogy. This was my 8th International genealogy conference, my first being RootsTech 2012, but it was my first IAJGS Conference. The venue was The Swan ...

I fixed a few bugs in Double Match Triangulator that I found while preparing for my workshop at the IAJGS Conference on Monday. I also changed DMT to display people ordered by longest segment rather than total segments, and released it as Version 1.5.1. I’m looking forward to giving the workshop. We’re ...

One option I didn’t realize existed at FamilyTreeDNA until Jay Sage alerted me. You can selectively hide or show the people whose matches are deemed “Immediate”, “Close”, “Distant” or “Speculative”. Here’s Jay’s instructions: In the upper-right corner of the home screen, mouse over the ...

It is very true. The English language is full of inconsistencies. And one of these inconsistences is the pronunciation of the letter “G”. There is the hard “G”, as in: great, gallop, flying, guppy and goat. And there is the soft “G”, as in gentle, giraffe, gem or gymnasium. Hard “G”s ...

Is it true genealogists have more fun? Unfortunately I had to miss #genchat on Twitter last night. The questions and answers this week were about DNA testing, starting with MRCAs and then branching out. For those of you who do not know what #genchat is, it is a genealogy based Twitter chat that happens every ...

Some of the least reliable information provided by DNA tests are the ethnicity percentages, also called admixtures. After getting my and my uncle’s DNA test results, I posted my ethnicity results. Our Ashkenazi Jewish percentages came in at 79% and 89% at FamilyTreeDNA and my result came in at 83.8% at ...