Friday, July 20, 2007 - Fri, 20 Jul 2007

Here’s a way I used Behold today: At the Jewish Resources page of the LDS site, they’ve added the Knowles Collection with info on thousands of people from the British Isles. They provide that data as a download, either for PAF or as a GEDCOM.

I loaded the GEDCOM into Behold. There are 10,831 people. Behold figured out for me who the main 20 or so families were. A quick scan of these names did not point out any families that would be interesting. But just to make sure, I expanded the Index of Names in the Tree View and in a couple of minutes scanned the 500 or so surnames, clicking on a few along the way to see in the Everything Report the individual people with that surname. Still nothing of interest to me. Then I expanded the Source Details to see the 11 sources this data came from. Interesting, but this file is not much use in my research.

That all took about 3 minutes!

How about PAF. Well, I downloaded the PAF file and loaded it into PAF. I was surprised that this file only had 6358 individuals. In PAF, the Family view and Pedigree View are practically useless to figure out the families. The Individual view can allow me to scan all 6358 names, which would take a bit of time and be somewhat tiring to do. If I would have found someone of interest, I’m not sure how easy it would be to find out all the information entered about that person and all relatives, including all events, notes, and sources for them.

What do you do when you get an unknown GEDCOM file you want to look at?