Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

I’m back hard at work on Behold, trying to finish off the many features I’ll be including in Version 1.3 when it’s ready. Some of the changes for Version 1.3 made me take a look again at Behold’s GEDCOM import. Behold currently is a flexible GEDCOM reader. That is, it will accept almost anything that ...

Today, Ancestry sent me an email saying they updated the parent group assignments of my DNA matches: Ancestry calls this technology SideView, and I first wrote about it last December in my article Evaluating Ancestry DNA’s Parental Matches where I compared Ancestry’s assignments to other methods and ...

Everything has its time. And the time for GenSoftReviews is up. GenSoftReviews is a site that was at www.gensoftreviews.com that I ran from 2008 until today, to allow users to come and review their genealogy software. They could rate the software from 1 to 5 stars and leave a textual review with a suggestion ...

Part of the work of genealogists in this digital age is to scan their old physical material. I’ve got many boxes in the closet and basement as well as binders in my shelves that still need to be gone through and digitized. You can only do this one piece at a time, so it’s a manner of picking a project and ...

It’s been a long time since I blogged about the tools I use on my computer to deal with my photos. Looking back, I had these articles: Jan 2006: Windows 98 to Windows XP On Windows 98, I was using JASC Paint Shop Photo Album 5.  When I got a new computer with Windows XP, JASC had been bought ...

I’ve put up more than 1200 blog posts since 2002, but I have never up to now posted a biography about anyone in my family tree. I thought today would be a good day to start. Zalmon Hertzan was a younger brother of my great grandmother Toba Focsaner. He was born on Jan 10, 1873, so today would have been his ...

I’ve been a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) for 10 years now, since 2013. I don’t take clients but use my membership to add a bit more credence to my genealogy activities, software development and speaking engagements. Many professional organizations in a variety of fields ...

Happy New Year everyone. GenSoftReviews is the website I created in 2009 to allow users to rate and review their genealogy software. The goal was for the site to be like a Tripadvisor for genealogists to allow them to see what others think of the various programs before they buy, and to allow the software ...

Every year on December 31, I have been summarizing my website page views, family tree counts and DNA matches and putting that on my What’s New page of my lkessler.com website so that I can see how much they’ve changed from the year before. But I’ve never before posted these stats on my blog. This year, I ...

A couple of months ago, Ancestry came out with a new feature called Parental Matches, that shows which parent a DNA match is connected to. My own DNA should be a good test for this. I have 100% endogamy on all my ancestral lines, but my parents are not related according to GEDmatch’s test. Both my parents ...