Blew Them Away - Wed, 20 May 2009

My talk tonight about Behold to 40 people of the EEGS (East European Genealogical Society) here in Winnipeg went better than well. The audience was really taken by my talk of what`s wrong with genealogy software, and how Behold is doing it the right way.

Other genealogy software are all big black boxes where you deposit your data, entered inefficiently via tedius forms. To see your data, you generate inadequate reports that don`t display everything and then force you to bounce between your reports and input forms to manually fix or add to your data. Repeat and continue ad infinitum.

I surveyed the crowd. 90% had computers. About 70% used genealogy software, mostly Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Brother`s Keeper and PAF. There was one Unix GRAMPS user and one Mac iFamily user. Only about one quarter of them knew what GEDCOM was.

I took them through Behold step by step. I swear I could hear a pin drop. The next thing I knew and an hour and a half had passed and it was time to wrap up and questions. The biggest disappointment was that Behold cannot edit yet. The biggest surprise was that Behold has free upgrades for life.

Talk to any one of those 40 people, and you will now find them intrigued by Behold`s promising solution to making their genealogy data usable.

Days like today are great to get my motivation going.

Now back to making Behold the reality I expect it to be.