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 ...

I have released Version 4.3 of Double Match Triangulator which includes changes to allow it to read the new Family Tree DNA segment file format. On July 1, Family Tree DNA announced changes to their matching algorithm along with other updates on their blog: Updates To Family Finder, Featuring Improved Matching ...

@WikiTreers is a free One-World family tree set up like a wiki. It has been in operation since 2008. It currently has over 27 million profiles. The community of people who use WikiTree set up various online social events and challenges amongst themselves to encourage improvement of the quality of their tree. ...

This Wednesday, July 14 at 3 p.m EDT, I’ll be introduced as the @WikiTreers guest for the week. I’ll be on the panel of the Livecast which will be about an hour long. The first half hour will be the “reveal” of John Boeren, whose week they’ll have just finished up. The next half hour will introduce ...

I wrote several months ago about the WikiTree Challenge: No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge Each week, WikiTree is holding a challenge for all the people who use WikiTree as part of their “Year of Accuracy”. They invite a genealogy special guest – usually someone well-known amongst ...

When I first started doing my genealogy in 1974, I didn’t have a genealogy program to use. I started just like everyone else, simply recording information, and how everyone was connected in hand-drawn family trees. I had access to a Script document processor utility on the mainframe at my University that I ...

It’s been just over a week since FamilySearch released the official version of GEDCOM 7.0. See my article about the announcement. Now we probably will go into a period of silence, where nobody hears anything more about GEDCOM 7.0 for a while. The expectation is that all the developers are hard at work ...

FamilySearch released the official version of GEDCOM 7.0 today. You can find it at https://gedcom.io selecting “Specifications” from the menu. The standard is available as PDF or as HTML pages. The PDF is 96 pages, compared to Version 5.5.1 which was 101 pages. The specifications page also has a link to ...

I’ve been an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), i.e. single developer operation, for over 15 years. I have had my products Behold and Double Match Triangulator available for download for the many versions of each of them. I never put adware, spyware, viruses or anything bad in my programs. I pay money each ...

Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for this week is: I thought I’d do that, following Randy’s template: A) On AncestryDNA, I have 149,270 matches. My Top 10 matches are: * First cousin, mother’s side, 1,047 cM, in tree * First cousin, mother’s side, 914 cM, in tree * ...

It’s been a while since I’ve put my full effort into getting Behold to that next level that would include GEDCOM export and editing. In fact, I have to admit that I really haven’t made a lot of changes to Behold except for bug fixes and a 64-bit executable since 2017. What I did start doing in February ...

@WikiTree #WikiTreeChallenge Wikitree with over 25 million profiles, is the 3rd largest collaborative family tree, after FamilySearch Family Tree and Geni. As the name suggests, the site is designed like a wiki, giving all users ability to contribute and change (preferably with sources) and collaborate ...

Like hundreds of thousands of you, I had been looking forward to this year’s version of #RootsTech2021,  which is completely online and free to everyone. I have attended RootsTech in Salt Lake City three times in person, in 2012, 2014 and 2017. I couldn’t go from 2018 to 2020, but those years ...

Today I got a newsletter from Elizabeth O’Neal, who runs the Heart of the Family site.  The newsletter was about “Getting the Most Out of RootsTech”. What caught my attention was her point 5: “Check your growing list of cousins.” Elizabeth was talking about Relatives at RootsTech, which looks at ...

Yesterday, I released  new version of Double Match Triangulator. This took longer than I hoped, but finally it’s out. In late November, GEDmatch changed the format of their segment match file and also made a change to their one-to-one report, so DMT needed to be updated to handle those. Also in May ...

**UPDATE** June 8:  FamilySearch has released the official version of GEDCOM 7.0. See my blog post: GEDCOM 7.0, Official. It appears that a GEDCOM Version 7.0 Release Candidate will be announced at RootsTech Connect on February 25. This will likely take place in the session by Gordon ...

The GEDCOM standard for transferring genealogical data has been in use basically unchanged for over 20 years now. Just about every genealogy software program can export (some of) its family data to a GEDCOM file, and can import (some of) the family data in a GEDCOM file into its database. The issue is the ...

Windows 10 comes with its own webserver called IIS (Internet Information Services). By default, IIS is not enabled because most people don’t need a webserver on their Windows computer. But if you want a copy of your website on your computer and want to be able to view your local copy and use it to test ...

Happy 2021 everyone! This is the 12th year of the awarding of Users Choice Awards to genealogy software that users have rated highly. Since 2008, GenSoftReviews, www.gensoftreviews.com has had users write 5,874 reviews for the 1,041 different genealogy-based programs listed at the site. Of these 1,041 ...