Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

A few questions that plague me. …Why Some Genealogists Keep Their Main Tree Private Isn’t the purpose of genealogy to preserve and share the history and stories of your ancestors and their families? So what then is the purpose in a genealogist designating their main tree as private and preventing ...

About 4 years ago, I selected @MyHeritage as my platform to record my genealogical information. I liked MyHeritage best for several reasons. Their customers and datasets were less USA-centric than Ancestry’s, and that fit right into my Eastern European origins. Their free Family Tree Builder program ...

Among that family materials I’ve been going through was a photocopied Memorial Book for the town of Mezhiritch in the Ukraine. My mother received this pile of paper from her cousin many years ago. The Memorial Book was printed in Israel in 1955 and it is 442 pages.. So I have it on about 250 sheets of paper. ...

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 ...