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 ...

Will I break it now? Today on Facebook, Alex Krakovsky posted:   Alex Krakovsky  34m · Yes, it's true. FamilySearch started publishing Jewish metrical records from the Odesa archive. Something that all of us were waiting for many many many years. So far they have published 81 books. 69 of ...

I took my first MyHeritage DNA test at RootsTech 2017 in Salt Lake City. At RootsTech 2024 last March, MyHeritage announced Ethnicity Estimation 2.0 which is to be released this June. There are many good reasons to get their new estimates. The estimates will be a free update for all users who tested on ...

… and including deceased people. This is something you want your online genealogy programs to do for you. Privacy of living people is important, so you want living people to be excluded. MyHeritage displays living people like this, showing all the people with their birth surname and a given name of ...

Bertha German was born April 1, 1924 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The youngest of 7 children, living together in a small house at 524 Flora Avenue. Toby Braunstein was born on April 7th, 6 days later and 600 km (370 miles) to the west on the farm in the rural municipality of Tullymet, Saskatchewan, Canada. ...

Do you often go to a genealogy site and do a specific search (e.g. surnames and places) for your family records? And then do you go back a few weeks later and search for the same information again because you forgot that you searched for it a few weeks ago? And then do you go back a month later and search again ...

One of the reasons why I closed GenSoftReviews last year was because the development of new programs for genealogy had been drying up. There are so many full featured genealogy programs available to choose from that there is hardly any task that at least some of them could do. And with the onset about 10 ...

Over the past several months, I’ve been back to work on the next version of Behold. I’m hoping to release the next major version in the next …  - okay, a programmer knows better than to promise a release date, but let’s say as soon as it’s ready. Keep an eye on Behold’s Future page to follow my ...

There’s been a lot of talk the last year or so about the use of Artificial Intelligence for Genealogy. I’ve basically taken a laissez faire wait-and-see attitude towards it. Most of the applications of AI for genealogy are designed to save you time, maybe by drafting out a biography for you or doing image ...