Interesting events! Yesterday, Bob Coret realized that there were two versions of GEDCOM 5.5. Bob wrote on his Google Plus account yesterday: I compared the grammar published in the #GEDCOM 5.5 LDS/PDF ("2 January 1996") version to one in the #GEDCOM 5.5 McBride/HTML ("Revised 10 January ...
2014 is almost over. It’s been quite a full year for me. This is my 35th blog post for the year. I’ve also been active on Twitter and GooglePlus. I started the year off preparing for a lecture on Windows Phone for Genealogy at RootsTech 2014 in Salt Lake City. Then shortly after I got back, my father ...
I, like anyone, am concerned when I type in credit card information online. We’ve all heard of a rash of hacks into online databases such as Target a year ago and Home Depot in September. So it didn’t surprise me to hear about a crackdown on security measures to ensure that your credit data is made safe. ...
We approach the end of December. I look back to the beginning of the year when I said, in fact I even made a new year’s resolution on this blog, that this year I’d get the next few versions of Behold out. Well, that didn’t happen. There were a few personal issues that I had to attend to, especially my ...
You likely might not have caught the relevance of the two announcements made on Monday and Tuesday that rocked the genealogy software world. On November 24, MyHeritage announced: Family Historian Genealogy Software Integrates MyHeritage Matching Technologies for Automated Discoveries. And the next day, ...
Trying to write a flexible GEDCOM reader to read in every flavour of GEDCOM back to the early days is rather difficult when the standards used prior to version 5.3 from 1993 just aren’t available anywhere. I have scoured the Internet and the Internet archives for that matter, to try to dig up some of the ...
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 ...
While preparing my presentation of Reading Wrong GEDCOM Right for the Gaenovium Conference, I wanted to see if I had in my collection of over 600 test GEDCOM files some early GEDCOMs from the pre-GEDCOM 5.0 era. I searched my files for some of the pre-GEDCOM 5.0 tags outlined by Tamura Jones in his GEDCOM Tags ...
Lots going on in the technical genealogy world, and so much incorrect thinking in my opinion. The major online services are quietly going about their business: Ancestry, FamilySearch and MyHeritage (which now includes Geni) are the big three, but there are scores of others such as GeneaNet and WikiTree. ...
The official announcement is out. And I now can announce that I’ll be flying to the city of Leiden, Netherlands in early October. Gaenovium will be a small one day conference on October 7 for genealogy technology creators, so it will give me a wonderful opportunity to meet, share, discuss and argue with ...
This is starting to get ridiculous. I’ve spent the close to 2 years trying to design and implement all the complexities of 3 new features that I think will be really important to help you with your genealogical research, which I’ve called: Ages Everywhere, Life Events, and Who’s Alive at Events. The work ...
How many have you even heard of? Over at GenSoftReviews, where I maintain a website allowing users to rate and review their genealogy software, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the genealogy programs that is approaching 800. In the last month alone, I’ve found, or people have told me about 14 16 new ...
One thing I’ve tried to do with Behold is optimize its speed. I want it to load your GEDCOM and display the Everything Report for you as fast as possible. I’ve worked hard to do this and have made it a program that is notable for its loading speed. Every version prior to release, I check both the speed and ...
I’ve saved all my important emails since 2002. This is my 2nd or 3rd computer upgrade since then. The other times, I was able to transfer my email easily into the mail program on my new computer. But I ran into a slight glitch this time. My old computer was Windows Vista and my email program was Windows ...
Ready for an adventure? Anything that should be easy usually isn’t, especially when it comes to computers and hardware. A new computer is expected to result in a boost to productivity … but only after the dust settles. Why is there always so much dust? The first step is setting up the hardware. I thought it ...
11. When you’ve still got Windows Vista. 10. When your monitors are so old that one flashes for 30 seconds when it starts up and the other’s color doesn’t match. Yes, you could simply get new monitors if this is your only problem. 9. You can’t connect to your home network because every time you try to ...
I have been busy the past couple of years. Busy trying to assemble my thoughts about the genealogy software of today and the software for tomorrow. I’ve had my eyes open and I’ve been listening intently. The winds are changing somewhat and course corrections for all developers are required if they want to ...
Last week I used #RootsTech to attempt the start of what may become a radical change to the way I work.
It started with an experiment. I had said in an earlier blog post what items I would be carrying with me. At RootsTech 2012 the list included my digital camera, my cellphone, my laptop, a pen, a binder ...
At #RootsTech there were many vendors in the exhibition hall. I’m not sure what the total number of booths was, but it must have been close to 200. I think it took me over 6 hours to thoroughly go through the hall and talk to quite a few of the vendors. I’m always interested in any new genealogy software ...
Four whirlwind days at #RootsTech. Overall it was what I hoped for and what I expected based on my experiences from 2012. The larger half of the Salt Palace Convention Center gave us enough space to mill around. The exhibition hall was almost too large with so many vendors, it was almost impossible to do them ...
If you count the Innovators Summit day, this is really my 4th day, and the final day of RootsTech. I have to wrap up and leave by 1 p.m. to catch my flight home.
Skipped this morning's #RootsTech keynotes to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Leonardo Museum in SLC for 6 mo ...
We're now starting my third full day of #RootsTech activity. Lots happened again. Here's what:
I got to the keynotes in the middle of the Legal Genealogist's talk. She was very dynamic. I liked her stories, but didn't tweet about it, so lets start with my first tweet for the next keynote.
Spencer ...
Today was the official first day of #RootsTech. Here's what happened according to my tweets:
Close to 5000 people listening to Dennis Brimhall's opening keynote at #RootsTech. http://t.co/tZsaupNj2B— Louis Kessler (@louiskessler) February 6, 2014
Annelies Jansen in her #rootstech keynote ...
Today was the day before the official start of #RootsTech 2014, and it was called the Innovator's Summit. There were probably about 400 people who attended the Keynote, and that was followed by 4 4 sessions with 4 speakers to choose from in each session.
Today I was live tweeting a lot at the session using ...
#RootsTech last minute organizing includes figuring out what you’re going to be carrying around with you. I’ve assembled the things I’ll be carrying with me. Lets go clockwise starting from the left. In addition, or maybe instead of the name tag that RootsTech will supply me, I’ll be wearing the ...
With #RootsTech 2014 just a week away, the Syllabi from the sessions now are available. I am going to the conference this year. Now that the syllabi are out, I make sure I browse through them to confirm that the sessions I previously planned out still are the ones I want to go to. But even if you’re not ...
It’s been over 5 years since I set up GenSoftReviews. My goal was to have a website, sort of like TripAdvisor for travelers, that would allow comparisons of Genealogy software from reviews and ratings by actual users. During that time, users have provided over 1900 reviews for hundreds of different programs. ...
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