Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

It seems that I’ve created a series of posts about dating. First there was Sort of a Date where I discussed the problems in sorting GEDCOM dates. Then there was How About a Date? where I reviewed the GEDCOM syntax for dates and how many programs break them. While writing my FixDate function to correct those ...

Behold has been submitted as an entry to the RootsTech Developer Challenge. When I read the challenge: "Create an application or service that introduces a compelling new concept or innovation for family history." - well, there was no better description of Behold that I could have made up myself. Along ...

Last post, I discussed what would be necessary in Behold to properly sort dates. I also wrote a bit about input of dates and output of dates. I started implementing date sorting and I was using the raw DATE value as input into Behold. I had to interpret it and fix it prior to setting up the sort ordering ...

Behold up to now has really not done much with the DATEs that have come in from the GEDCOM. It does look at the date value to pull out the year so it can display birth and death years in the Index of Names. And it was attempting to sort the dates in the event references in the Details sections, but in a very ...

Everybody’s leery about buying a Version 1 of anything. I am as well. Obviously, if it is Version 1, then it is a new rookie program that hasn’t been field tested and is full of bugs. And every programmer who puts out a Version 1 wants it to be perfect. The beta test was supposed to be to get all the ...

I received an email from Andy Hatchett, one of the expert users deeply involved in the BetterGEDCOM initiative. He had downloaded and tried Behold and then asked me, "How does one get the events within individuals and families to show in chronological order?". Currently, I display all the events in the order ...

Please feel free to post the following Press Release or any excerpt you want out of it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1977, I developed the concept for the Everything Report using a primitive Word Processor. 18 years later, in 1995, I developed the first prototype of Behold, with a batch program that would read a GEDCOM file and produce an Everything Report. 10 years later, in 2005, the first publicly-available alpha ...

Randy Seaver is a genealogist who I really admire and respect. I read his Genea Musings blog posts religiously as they come out. He spends more time at genealogy than most of us spend just being awake. His continual investigation into the programs he uses - Family Tree Maker, Legacy and RootsMagic hold me ...

As it turns out, I was able to handle the RootsMagic 4.0 illegal GEDCOM tags fairly easily. There were only FIELD, TID and VALUE. I was able to simply add them to Behold's internal default tag file. The improperly used NAME field would have been a problem, but Behold displays it correctly and doesn't try to ...