Monday, November 6, 2006 - Mon, 6 Nov 2006

Thank you everyone, for submitting your GEDCOMs for inclusion as sample programs with Behold. Including your actual files with Behold will add that personal touch to Behold, which I think is something special.

I received 21 submissions, created by 7 different programs. Legacy was the most popular, followed by PAF, Brother’s Keeper, Family Tree Maker, Ancestral Quest, Reunion and Ancestral File. They ranged in size from 15 kBytes to 2,437 kBytes, containing from 13 to 4,478 individuals.

It was hard to choose between the ones submitted, as each was unique in its own way. In the end, I chose these three:

(1) Steve McCarthy’s Legacy file is filled with data types, lots of notes, and many sources and repositories. It’s an excellent example of how to do a good job of documenting your research. I often use a Source:Individual ratio to estimate the amount of documentation of a GEDCOM, and Steve’s ratio of 71 sources for 141 people is right up there.

(2) Larry Cada’s PAF file is small and simple. With only 32 individuals in it, it will be excellent for easily demonstrating Behold’s various features. In addition, it is the only one I received that uses a different character set (Eastern European), and this will also be excellent for demo’ing Unicode when I get to adding that.

(3) Max Haiflich sent me his set of 16 GEDCOM files that were extracted from FamilySearch.org. I’ll be working in the next Version to treat people with the same Ancestral File Number (AFN) as the same person in a Behold report. This will effectively become the logic Behold will use to merge people in its report. I’ll be working on this in a month or two and then I’ll include Max’s GEDCOM set as the example.

To Steve, Larry, and Max: You can expect a special gift following the sale of my 1000′th copy of Behold. That is in addition to the gift I promised to Dave Newbury (I haven’t forgotten you, Dave) who was the very first person to purchase Behold over a year ago.

To the others who submitted their GEDCOMs, I’m sorry I couldn’t include everyone’s file with Behold. But I thank you for your willingness to help, and I will use your files for testing so that when version 1.0 is released, Behold should work perfectly for you.