Getting Carried Away - Sun, 21 May 2017

I’ve noticed it’s been almost 2 months since my last blog post, and that’s too long. I kept delaying my posts with the hope and expectation that my next one would be announcing the release of Behold 1.3. 

However, the changes to Behold have been taking longer than I hoped. With Spring bringing beautiful weather and other Spring duties, there is less time during the day for programming than in the Winter. Programmers can sometimes turn into depressing people who hope for miserable weather and rainy days so they can get more work done.

Also, I might have been getting a little “carried away” with what I’m trying to get into this version of Behold. I do want Behold 1.3 to finish off everything I need/want in the Everything Report prior to adding GEDCOM export and then Behold’s own database and editing.

Below are the things I’m trying to sneak in:

Highlighted Birth/Maiden Names

I wanted birth/maiden names to be highlighted somehow.  And I wanted that highlighting everywhere. I decided on bolding the birth/maiden name.

This was trickier than it sounds because the person’s name is a hyperlink to that person in the report. Breaking up the styling of the name breaks the hyperlink into three parts. I had to figure a way to break the styling but leave a single hyperlink. It’s different in the Everything Report, in the Treeview, in the HTML export and in the RTF export.

This required a change to the Index of Names. Previously I was using bold text to show the earliest people in each line (those without parents attached). I needed another representation for this and decided on the asterisk (*) before the name. And then, while doing that, why not in add the person’s birthplace to make it easier to identify people:

Section Header Information

I want the section headers to give some information about the numbers of people included as well as information about the amount of pedigree collapse.

Fact/Event Selection and Filtering

Behold has always allowed selection of which Tags you want displayed. On the Tags page of the Organize window, there was a box you could select or deselect if you wanted a certain tag included or excluded from the Report. Unfortunately, this never worked perfectly because tags could occur at different levels, i.e. within other tags, and this mechanism did not work for the Place Details or Source Details section. In other words, you couldn’t just get a listing of all your sources for, say, Census facts.

To fix this situation, there will now be checkboxes only beside the tags which at at Level 1 in INDI (individual) or FAM (family) records. Those will now be counted on the Tags page in their own “Facts” column.

This now allows you to display only the facts you want. For example, you can select just BIRT, MARR and DEAT tags if you want to just show the vital statistics for everyone and see only your vital statistics sources in the Source Details section. You could select just CENS for just the Census facts. You can select BURI to effectively give you a burial list in the Place Details section.

To make selection easier, at the right of the Tags page, I’ve added Def (Default) and None checkboxes. By checking “None”, you can uncheck everything and just add the few facts you want to show. By checking “Def”, you can show all the most important facts again and check or uncheck any others as desired.

These can then be saved into a Behold file with the “merge into” button and retrieved again with the “Merge from” button. So you can set up Behold files for “Vital Stats”, “Census Only”, and “Burials” and quickly switch between them.

DNA Features

I want/need some DNA features that I don’t see readily available in other programs. Behold is going to tell you all the ways each person is related to your starting people, their probability of sharing autosomal DNA, their expected shared autosomal DNA if they share, the same for the X chromosome and whether they share Y-DNA or mt-DNA. For all furthest-back ancestors of the starting people, their Y-candidates or mt-candidates would be listed. Those are the people alive today you can test to get that ancestors line. And inversely, for every living person, all the furthest-back ancestors who they would be Y or mt-candidates for would be listed. I don’t have a final mockup of this yet, but I’m thinking of something like this for every person:

Cheat Sheet

Well, that’s what I call it. It’s something I use in my research all the time. My first scan of any family information (e.g., an archive, book index, online site) would be to look for matches from these two alphabetically ordered lists:

1. All ancestral surnames and the furthest-back ancestor of each one.
2. All ancestral birth places and the furthest-back ancestors of each one.

They will be optionally shown just after the Table of Contents. I’m still finalizing how they’ll look and what they’ll contain.

All of this is all almost ready. Lots of little details to finish, but I thought it important to post my progress here and now and not let you think I’ve vanished from the face of Behold development.