Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

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 because you wanted to see if there’s anything new thinking you last did that search 6 months ago?

One of our big timewasters can be doing the same search over and over. We as genealogists want to be organized and search our favorite indexes in a systematic manner. We don’t want to miss anything and we want to be efficient at it.

Sure, every so often we’ll go off on a wild goose chase searching down some rabbit holes, and that’s okay. We need a bit of fun, and sometimes that can result in a gem or two. But we don’t want random searching to be our raison d’être.

Everyone has their own favorite search sites, be it MyHeritage, Ancestry, FamilySearch, BillionGraves, Newspaper sites, and hundreds of others. Each has a similar but slightly different search tool.

A few months ago, JewishGen, one of the most useful resources for my own genealogy research, started adding a lot of indexed records from the towns in the Ukraine that my ancestors are from. I knew I needed to check what they had and compare those with the records I acquired over the past few years from my Ukraine researcher Boris Makalsky to see what’s new that I don’t have.

I wanted to do this in a rigorous manner and a way that I’d know exactly what I searched for and also what it was I found that was relevant to my family.

Searching on JewishGen

I’ve been using JewishGen for many years. They have a very nice unified search that provides results from all of their many database indexes. A simple version of their search is available on their home page and looks like this:

The first two dropdown boxes allow you to choose between Surname, GivenName, Town or Any Field. Lara Diamond wrote an article “Tips to Find Relatives on JewishGen” explaining the best ways to use the JewishGen search.

For me, I found my best way was to use the simple search and search for a combination of my ancestral surname and the town they lived in. For example, searching for the surname “Dubovy” in the town of “Zhitomir”, JewishGen returns  the result below. (Click on any image for a larger version).

This search returns 99 matches from 9 databases on JewishGen plus 64 records on Yad Vashem that aren’t included in the 99 number. Clicking on the “List xxx records” buttons on the right will bring up the search results for each database. e.g. the 26 results from the Marriage Group 3 database start off like this:

Keeping Track, Avoiding Re-Searching

I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of my searches. Each column would be the surname and town I would search followed by the date I last did this search and the number of search results JewishGen said it found.

On the left, I would list each of the databases that JewishGen had results for me in my searches.

The intersecting squares would have the number of search results for the search listed in the column and the database in the row. The cells with relevant results would be white and the others would be yellow.

The total number of records found (less Yad Vashem) would be summed in row 5 and I could easily compare it with the number in row 4 which was the total that the search said there were.

The last time I had done this Dubovy Zhitomir search as you can see from the spreadsheet was March 23 or which was just 4 days ago. Normally, I wouldn’t do a search 4 days after I previously did it since results usually would be the same, and the total is still 99.

But I may decide to do re-do a search that I hadn’t done in a few months if I was working on that surname or place. Let’s say the total matches found increased by 10. Then I could compare the JewishGen results for each database with my spreadsheet, and update any counts that changed, and in doing so, I’ll know  which databases have new results for me to look at.

This spreadsheet now has 69 rows listing different databases and 32 columns of searches that I do. I would never be able to remember what I’ve done or what I still have to do without this spreadsheet.

How about Research Logs?

A lot of people love research logs, but I’ve never really been a fan. They are a document organized by time, rather than by task.

Writing each search I do and the results I get into a time-organized research log would allow me to find the last time I did a specific search such as Dubovy in Zhitomir, but it does not give me a good handle on where I stand on all my searches nor make it easy to see what searches I’ve done and have yet to do.

Conversely, I do like timelines and organizing certain materials by date, such as my picture collection or events for each person.

For keeping track of searches, I feel my spreadsheet is a much better tool.

Cataloguing the Search Results

And then I want to do the analysis of each search result, and determine which ones are relevant and give me information about my family. For that I created a set of spreadsheets, one for each type of record. e.g. Birth, Marriage, Death, Revision Lists (which are Russian censuses), etc.

Here’s part of a page from my JewishGen Marriage spreadsheet:

The tabs at the bottom are spreadsheet pages, one for each surname.

The page is divided into sections organized alphabetically by town. Line 48 is where the 26 results for Dubovy in Zhitomir start.

Columns I through X and even further, in this case up to column AJ, contain all the fields from the search results page.

I add in 3 other important columns:

• Column F tells me if that is a record that my researcher had found for me.
• Column D tells me if the person is in my MyHeritage tree and if so, I include a link to my tree so that I can instantly access him.
• Column B is a source citation made from a formula that pulls out information from the other fields.

I love that last item. The equation in cell B51 looks like this:

="JewishGen, "&H51& ", "&U51&" of "&J51&" "&I51&" and "&L51&" "&K51&" "&AE51&" in "&AD51

and the resulting citation is:

Conclusion

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 years ago of genealogy software that could provide you record hints and tree matches automatically, anything less would be a no-go for most people.

Treebard

So to my surprise, yesterday I learned about a program that I had not heard of previously in a Facebook post from Tamura Jones. The program is called Treebard, by Scott Robertson. He describes it as:

“a free, open-source, portable, public-domain genealogy database-entry showcase of functionalities written in Python, Tkinter, and SQLite”

I had to Google “Tkinter”, because I didn’t know what it was.

If it were just another genealogy program, then I wouldn’t have been bothered. But it is the wealth of content that Scott has included on his website about his programming endeavor that interested me and made me take notice.

Scott’s Philosophy

Scott’s program is not brand new, but it is relatively new on the scale of when most genealogy programs were being started, which is decades ago. The program’s Readme on Github states that Scott, with the username ProfessUdGuru, started developing the program in July 2018. That’s almost 6 years ago, and what surprises me is that neither Tamura nor I had heard of the program before.

Scott’s writings include a lot of commentary about GEDCOM, (that I’ll come to in a bit) which he dismisses by stating:

“I am particularly fond of the idea that someone will see the light about continuing to limp along with GEDCOM, and instead just start using Treebard’s database structure (UNIGEDS) or be inspired by it, to give birth to a Universal Genealogy Data Structure which would replace GEDCOM if app developers could be inspired enough to all use the same data storage structure for their app’s primary features.”

He writes about Treebard’s Kind of Genealogy:

1. Not conclusion-based, and not evidence-based, but one-factoid-at-a-time-based.
2. Super easy to enter sources without copying and pasting.
3. Conclusions are backed up by assertions. Assertions are backed up by sources. He says his assertions feature is unique to Treebard. Although I think it very much resembled the persona idea promoted by Tom Wetmore, developer of Lifelines. “Assertions are what your sources say.”
4. A friendly and intuitive user interface. It should be easy to do complicated things.
5. A simple and straightforward data structure, good enough for all programmers to adopt someday.

His Videos

Scott has a new YouTube channel with 38 videos that he’s added in the past 3 weeks. They are all very interesting and worth watching

• 2 are about Treebard’s Philosophy
• 4 are about using Treebard
• 10 are a Treebard GPS Tour 2022 
• 1 is about his Trying to Use Gramps Genealogy Software
• 2 are about Genealogy Resources
• 8 are about GEDCOM programming
• 12 are a Do-It-Yourself Genealogy Application 2024 (Scott’s jouney in the writing of his program)  

And he’s funny as well. You’ll enjoy Scott’s unique honest presentation style.

The Database

I was very curious as to what Scott’s “Universal Genealogy Data Structure” looked like. He used much of what would be considered common practice, following GEDCOM’s record and data structures in many cases (e.g. his dates are just like GEDCOM).

In one of his videos, he said he originally didn’t want a family record, but eventually decided he needed one to hang his family events onto.

Below is his data structure from his Create Your Own Genealogy Software 002 video. (Click on image to get a larger image).

Notable: he has a Place table (a big omission from GEDCOM).

And unlike GEDCOM, his database has an Events table, effectively making his program an events-based program. In the early days of GEDCOM, an Event-GEDCOM standard was developed parallel to our conclusion-based GEDCOM, but it didn’t really catch on. Scott would probably prefer Treebard to be referred to as an assertion-based program, since the assertions that are attached to sources are his unique feature.

Here for example is how Treebard presents its assertions from his Tour 008 video:

Scott’s Thoughts on GEDCOM

Of all his videos and writings (and there’s a lot of it), my favorite is Scott’s commentary about GEDCOM. Here’s his points that intrigued me the most:

• Scott took more than 3 months to create a GEDCOM import program by “curbing my appetite for perfection.”
• He replaced all of GEDCOM’s ambiguous tags with unambiguous tags.
• He did not handle “edge cases such as tags that no one uses since they’re so very close to being useless”.

Check out the rest of Scott’s GEDCOM page (items 17 to 93) for his many other comments about GEDCOM specifics that I mostly agree with.

I’m My Own Grandpa

Finally, as an extra bonus, at the beginning of Scott’s GEDCOM page, Scott lists the lyrics to Jaffe’ and Latham’s “I’m My Own Grandpa” song. And, he provides a GEDCOM file for it!

I loaded the GEDCOM file into Behold and Behold correctly reports that there are no loops. Actually the grandpa relationship is not by birth or adoption but is only through marriage which technically makes it possible. I’ll leave you to figure it all out as an exercise.

Conclusion

There is so much great stuff to read and watch at Scott’s website. Be sure to do so! And if you’re brave, try his software.

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 progress.

The last major release of Behold was Version 1.2.1 which I released in March 2016. Since then, I’ve released 6 additional point versions made up mostly of fixes and small improvements, with the last point release being Version 1.2.7 in September 2021.

So it’s been almost 8 years since the last major release of Behold. What have I been up to?

What Have I Been Up To?

Two things really.

The first thing that caught me was DNA. It was just after my 2016 Unlock The Past Genealogy cruise that I submitted my uncle’s and then my DNA to Family Tree DNA for testing. At that point it was DNA or Bust and I submitted my DNA everywhere, learned everything I could about genetic genealogy, and in 2017 created my Double Match Triangulator program which placed 3rd in the Roots Tech 2017 Innovator Showdown. I spent a lot of time over the past 8 years developing DMT and getting every last drop of genealogical worth out of my tests. I’ve written a lot of technical blog posts about my DNA analysis over this time. And that journey has now run its course.

The other thing that slowed me down is my own genealogy. That’s a very good thing! It was 2016 when I headed into my retirement from my 40 year career at Manitoba Hydro. Up to that point, my genealogy effectively lay dormant in dozens of binders, files and boxes. This was material I collected over the years with the intention of going through and putting together once I retired. And I’ve been doing that.

As far as my actual family tree itself, I hadn’t updated it since 1994 when I was using Reunion for Windows. Leister sold their Windows program to Sierra Online who were redeveloping it as Generations, but it was then purchased by Genealogy.com and dropped to eliminate the competition for their program Family Tree Maker. I still have the last GEDCOM file I exported from Reunion called KESS9407.GED which had the 1,361 known relatives from my and my wife’s families.

I didn’t purchase another genealogy program after that. Instead, I started developing Behold in my spare time on evenings and weekends since I was then working full time. The intent was that it would be the genealogy editor I wanted for myself to replace Generations. I purchased a Rich Text editing package called TRichView to handle the display and editing. It works just like Word as a WSYIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, and the goal was to turn Behold into what would still be the only genealogy WYSIWYG editor.

I released the first alpha version of Behold in 2005, and Version 1.0 was out in 2011. So far it only was a GEDCOM reader, but I still desired it to be an editor.

Then a big change for genealogists happened. Companies like Ancestry and MyHeritage were offering online family tree programs with a bonus: billions of records with automated searches that provide you with relevant hints. That changed everything! In 2017, I attended the 13th International Genealogy Conference in Houston sponsored by Family Tree DNA. MyHeritage was there and offered a great lifetime half-price offer to all attendees on their complete package, and I bit. All of a sudden, MyHeritage’s Record Matches with their billions of records and Smart Matches with their millions of family trees were what was important. And their online editor was convenient and good enough, along with their free downloadable Family Tree Builder software that could sync with your online tree.

About the same time, I got lucky. Starting in 2017, records from my ancestors towns in what is now Ukraine and Romania started to become available. I acquired over 400 birth, marriage, death and census records from 4 different researchers and added 3 generations back to the early 1800s for most of my lines. MyHeritage and its record collections and family trees revolutionized my task of finding decendants of my newly discovered European family, sending me the likely matches to review. From the 1,361 known family members I had in 1994, my family tree has grown to be 10,800 today, which does include several thousand people in an important place to place study I have been working on.

I’m now sitting in a really good position. I’m well into digitizing my binders, files and boxes. Every day I check for new Record Matches and Smart Matches at MyHeritage and process them and their implications to my tree right away and research any additional hints they provide. The majority of my family tree information is now sourced. In 2016, I never thought I would get to this point.

So What’s Important Now?

Over the past 8 years, the information has just poured in. The tap is starting to run dry. I’m no longer expecting a lot of new information. Records only started in Eastern Europe in the early 1800s, so I won’t be able to go any further back. My family tree has matured and it’s a now a matter of ensuring quality and keeping up with any new records that come along.

What’s missing from this equation is to ensure the preservation of the data I have collected and to make it widely available so that others who connect with me won’t have to work to put it together it like I did. That would mean sharing it on other family tree sites such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, WikiTree, Geni, Geneanet, Genealogyonline.

I have an account on Ancestry, but I only have a small tree there. I have not used Ancestry’s hint system yet, since I’ve been concentrating on MyHeritage, but it would be valuable to do so. The key would be to set up a full tree there by downloading from MyHeritage and then uploading to Ancestry. Then Ancestry’s hints and family trees can work and do their magic and maybe fill in a few more boxes.

But once that initial tree is up, I can’t do it again. After I process the hints, a new upload will likely recreate all the old hints. So I’ll need to keep them synced somehow. There are two programs that claim to sync with Ancestry. One is Family Tree Maker and the other is RootsMagic.  I’ll have to experiment with both and see if a reinfusion of a new GEDCOM into either FTM or RM will continue to sync with Ancestry, or if it will break the linkage. If the linkage can be maintained, maybe I can then follow this procedure:

MyHeritage –> GEDCOM –> FTM or RM

FTM or RM -> Ancestry

Ancestry Hints –> MyHeritage

FamilySearch is also an important tree to have information at. I uploaded about 1,500 deceased family members via a GEDCOM a few years ago. RootsMagic and Ancestral Quest both sync with FamilySearch. I also understand that MyHeritage provides syncing with FamilySearch as well, but currently only for members of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Hopefully they eliminate that restriction in the future. Even so, you have to be careful because other people edit FamilySearch. You wouldn’t want to copy any unverified information from FamilySearch back into your own tree.

WikiTree is a One World tree. It is different because it stresses biographies with human input. This is valuable but requires a lot of manual labour to maintain. I was fortunate to have been a WikiTree Challenge guest and had my tree worked on, and I added to that later by being a participant in two of their Connect-a-Thon events. They have some great tools including a WikiTree Sourcer Browser extension which could pull a person’s facts from a FamilySearch or Ancestry page and then enter it for you on a new WikiTree person page, saving you a whole lot of typing and manual effort. Great tool! There is no program which will automatically sync with WikiTree for you. However, Behold does a pretty good job of displaying your WikiTree data that you’ve downloaded to a GEDCOM file.

Geni is another One World tree now owned by MyHeritage. It would be nice if MyHeritage could figure out some way of syncing data between Geni and MyHeritage. Geni does get hints from MyHeritage, and MyHeritage does give Record Matches with Geni profiles.

I’ve uploaded an extract of my family tree via GEDCOM to Geneanet and genealogyonline a few years ago, but I really haven’t worked enough with either of them to figure out how to best make use of their sites.

And What’s Needed Now?

We each have our one primary place where we maintain our family tree. It may be a desktop program, or an online tree, or a desktop program synced with an online tree.

What we need are programs to sync and/or make it easier to permeate our  information everywhere else. Nobody wants to have to retype everything a dozen times.

I no longer need to convert Behold into a genealogy editor. MyHeritage for me is good enough for that.

But I do like the assistance Behold already provides to be able to easily see what data I’ve got at MyHeritage and at all the other sites.

I want Behold to do a bit more. I have some ideas and I’m working on it.

Stay tuned.