Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

It’s time genealogists stopped their conclusion-based thinking and started going source-based. Source-Based Document Organization Source-Based Data Entry Standardizing Sources and now Repository-Based To Do Lists (Do you think there’s a not-so-subtle theme here?) I advocate that everything is better ...

With the talk of a new GEDCOM standard, and my talk about the old GEDCOM standard, one item not yet considered has been To Do lists. Many genealogists seems to want some sort of method of tracking their goals and the information they plan to find. They feel that keeping track of what they want to accomplish ...

I am releasing a freeware program I am calling GEDCOM File Finder. You can find it at: www.beholdgenealogy.com/gedcomfilefinder It’s a nice little program that does just one thing: It finds and classifies all the GEDCOM files (or GEDCOM variants) on your computer. It is simple and only has one screen, ...

I’m very lucky, being both a genealogist and a programmer programming genealogy. The two tasks are similar in many respects. You run into problems that are difficult to solve, you need to prove if something is correct or why it isn’t, and some days you make lots of progress whereas other days… well, you ...

I had a whirlwind 3 days in Leiden Netherlands to attend the one day Gaenovium genealogy technology conference. Gaenovium 2014 was the first time this conference was put on. It was intended to be small with a highly technical audience interested in getting together to discuss aspects of genealogy programming ...

I had a wonderful couple of days in Leiden, Netherlands. I live tweeted the two events I attended and included pictures of some of the people I had the pleasure to meet. Here are the highlights of Gaenovium on Tuesday through some of my tweets and tweets of others: Heading over to the Pviljoen in ...

I was looking for the early GEDCOM specifications prior to GEDCOM 5.3 from 1993, so I thought I’d contact some people I knew who I thought might have some of the early GEDCOM material laying around. One of those I contacted was Bill Harten, sometimes referred to as “the father of GEDCOM”, who I met and ...

Here’s a quick tip for genealogists or other online researchers. When you find information of interest on a website, don’t just print it or save a link to the website somewhere. Instead, save the whole webpage complete. Even if you use a note-taking tool such as OneNote or Evernote, you still may find ...

Note: This article has been submitted to FHISO’s Call For Papers as CFPS 114. Thank you to the people who provided comments and feedback that helped me finalize this paper: Tamura Jones, Enno Borgsteede, Tony Proctor, Randy Seaver, Richard Smith, and Tom Wetmore.   Contents Abstract Introduction ...

A few hours ago, I posted an article wondering if I may have found the world’s oldest GEDCOM file. Tamura Jones in response emailed me one that he thought may be older. Instead of beginning with a 0 HEAD record as all GEDCOMs do, this file begins with a 0HH record (no space between the 0 and the HH). It ...