Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

One of the best reasons to have your family tree on one of the major online sites MyHeritage, Ancestry or FamilySearch, is because of their record matching systems. They will go out and find records for the individuals in your tree from among the billions of records in their collections and make them available ...

I’m working hard on Version 2 of Behold, and I needed to write some code to strip out HTML from a string. This would be so Behold could display the text embedded in the HTML correctly without formatting. Since I’m a Windows and Office 360 aficionado, I get a version of Microsoft’s AI bot named Copilot ...

Over the past 3 days, RootsTech took place in Salt Lake City. RootsTech is the largest annual genealogy conference in the world, with tens of thousands of in person attendees and several million online attendees. I went to RootsTech in person three times, in 2012, 2014 and 2017. In 2018. RootsTech started ...

A few years ago, the Association of Professional Genealogists  @APGgenealogy started requiring that members report at least 12 hours of Continuing Education each year. I found the task of listing my CE time quite interesting and have posted them each year. Below is my Continuing Education activity list ...

I’m working hard on Behold to get Version 0.99.1 Beta released. It will include GEDCOM export which I think will make it a valuable tool for many genealogists. It has been taking longer to finish the GEDCOM export than I had hoped, partly because of opportunities to work on my own genealogy (which I don’t ...

Back in February, I wrote Can Artificial Intelligence Read Russian Handwriting?. I tried the tool Transkribus which looked promising, but did not do well at all. I forgot all about this until I started working with my sister’s niece Kim on my sister’s husband’s genealogy. Kim successfully used the ...

Here’s something new for those who would like to try it. FamilySearch has for a long time allowed uploads of private trees to its space called Genealogies.Those trees were searchable by others but were not editable. To update them, you had to upload a new tree. Quietly, FamilySearch has started a new ...

If you’re not a recent user of WikiTree, you might not be familiar with the term CC7. It stands for Connection Count at 7 Degrees. One “Degree” at WikiTree is defined to be a connection to a parent, sibling, child or spouse. Your connections up to 7 degrees are your shortest path to any other person. ...

MyHeritage is the site where I maintain my family tree information. I have one main tree for my family and my wife’s family along with a place-to-place study of the people who left the town of Mezhirichi in the Russian Empire in the early 1900’s to come to Winnipeg and their families. This tree now has ...

Today, I released a new version of Behold. This has been a long time coming as I’ve been working on it off and on for the past number of years. I gave my last status report in February that had some thoughts as to where I’m taking Behold. I wasn’t planning on releasing Version 2.0 of Behold until it was ...