Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

I’d like to bring up the topic of having witnesses in your genealogy data, and then how these should be represented in GEDCOM, the standard for transferring genealogical data. What is a Witness? A Witness is a person who sees an event. Often genealogical documents include signatures of witnesses, ...

Judy Russell just released a very interesting post: The 2022 DNA goals on her blog The Legal Genealogist. In it, Judy resolves to try to identify her “top who-is-this-person-match” at each testing company. Judy was the person who prompted, well um, pushed me into getting into DNA testing. It was during the ...

Happy 25th birthday to my lkessler.com website! On January 7, 1997, I added my initial content to my website for public view. Technically, it became available August 27 the year before, but that was only a “Coming Soon” page and 2 test pages. So January 7 is the official launch date. My first pages ...

Sometimes, website changes go smoothly. Sometimes they don’t. On December 28, I had a couple of rare free days, and I thought I’d finally get around to seeing if I could upgrade my sites from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.4. The programming language PHP is what runs WordPress and does most of the automation of the ...

As I was preparing GenSoftReviews for the annual User Choice Awards that I announce on January 1st or 2nd, I realized that I hadn’t checked the site’s links in a number of years. So I started up my link checker Xenu’s Link Sleuth and let it rip. I was amazed at the number of links I needed to fix. It took ...

Exactly 5 years ago today, which coincided with my 60th birthday, several hundred co-workers, friends and family met in the large conference room at the Manitoba Hydro head office in downtown Winnipeg on my last day of work to help see me off into “retirement”. I had a wonderful 41 years with the company ...

To my surprise, I downloaded my raw data from my 23andMe DNA test and it was different from my earlier downloads. I would have thought your raw data from a company wouldn’t change. I took one DNA test there, so my results should be determined once, and that’s what should be represented in my raw data. I ...

An issue about GEDCOM has once again come to my attention. In the GEDCOM 5.5.1 standard they write: Conflicting event dates and places should be represented by placing them in separate event structures with appropriate source citations rather than by placing them under the same enclosing event. I ...

Prompted by this week’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Genealogy post by Randy Seaver, I thought I’d like to document this in a blog post. 1971: As I entered high school (grade 10), my super-smart neighbor and friend who was two grades ahead of me recommended I follow his lead and get into programming at ...

Today, I completed week 6 of my 10 week SLIG course. Every Wednesday afternoon between Sept 15 and Nov 17, I’m being presented with two 75 minute lessons on Researching Russian Genealogy Records. There’s a 30 minute break between the lessons. There’s 15 minutes after the 2nd lesson where we’re given ...