Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

The day began with Max Blankfeld and Bennett Greenspan greeting the entire group. After honoring the veterans, and there must have been 50 in the room who stood to loud applause, they provided a bit of information about the conference. There are 240 in attendance. About 50 people, including myself, raised their hands as first timers. FTDNA currently has about 140 employees with many assisting with the Conference.

Peter Sjolund, http://www.dnaacademy.se/, the ISOGG Regional Coordinator for Sweden, next presented information about the Swedish Haplogroup Database, and how Y-DNA and mtDNA tests are helping to map the genealogy of Sweden back to the 1600’s. Peter came out with a power drill and a skull. He explained that the current FTDNA method of DNA testing is inefficient and then proceeded to drill into the skull and said that this was the new way. Of course, he said, it should not be used on living persons. He told us about the research being done by DNA tests on the many old skeletons being found in the world. These are being recorded at: www.ancestraljourneys.com. Peter showed how these old skeletons are being used to trace the ancestral paths to Sweden. He recommends everyone submit their mtDNA data to the world GenBank at:  http://www.tinyurl.com/mtDNAtoGenbank

At 10:15 am, Janine Cloud, the do-everything person for Family Tree DNA, presented “GAP Guidelines and You” – rules for Groups Projects Managers to follow. Basically, have fun and be nice. Janine says that some days, enforcing the GAP guidelines is like herding cats, or maybe sheep. There are almost 10,000 FTDNA projects now, managed by 8,000 Admins and Coadmins.

At 11 am, Frank Billingsley, a Houston TV weatherman, presented the story in his book “Swabbed and Found”. Frank was adopted and didn’t know who his parents were, and this was the story of his DNA journey to find them. This was the book that every attendee received free in their registration package. Frank’s presentation was very interesting and his story has many twists. He said: “The book is funny like me and cute like me. It reads like a Hardy Boys book. I hope you read it.” I waited with many others to get my copy personally signed by Frank. I look forward to reading it on the plane ride home after the Conference.

Frank’s book, Swabbed and Found, is available at Amazon:

Family Tree DNA provided a nice buffet lunch.

The afternoon started with a couple of breakout session with 3 choices. For the first session, I chose to listen to Jim Bartlett with “Specific Steps to Success with Autosomal DNA”. He started by asking how many people here have taken an autosomal test. Everyone put up their hand. He said 5 years ago, only 5 or 6 hands went up. Jim is retired and puts maybe 8 hours a day into mapping his DNA and he’s now mapped about 98% of it. See Jim’s fantastic website that I consider my bible of autosomal DNA analysis techniques at: www.segmentology.org

In the 2nd breakout session, I heard Roberta Estes talk on “Nine Autosomal Tools at Family Tree DNA & How to Use Them”. She gave all sorts of tips about less known features at FTDNA. She mentioned that Shared Origins can show matches by ethnicity. Profiles can show hidden information. Be sure to click on the “+” as well. Roberta talked about triangulation towards the end of her talk.

At 3:20, we went back to a single session. Dr. Michael Hammer presented “Top 10 Human Evolutionary Genomics”. Dr Hammer was the person that Bennett 18 years ago asked to do a DNA test for him … and the rest is history. Michael explained that humans today do not make up different subspecies or races because we only have a F_ST (a measure of population differentiation) of 15%. To be different races, 25% or more is needed. Neanderthal would be a different subspecies if it existed today, but humans are similar. His example was to show us photos of different people, and to see if we could place them as to where in the world they would come from, and no one got the majority correct. He gave a few interesting facts: Every individual has on average 100 DNA mutations. Fathers give 4 mutations  for every 1 mothers give. And the number of mutations grow as the father is older. So “watch out for old men”. He also talked about the Clint Eastwood effect, which is 7 children starting at age 34, ending at age 66, with 5 women.

Jim Brewster and Michael Sager then told the crowd about FTDNA’s Y-Haplotree & SNP Pack Update. Then Max, Bennett and Elliot answered any and all questions about anything to do with Family Tree DNA. The loudest laugh was when Bennett meant to say “The full mt” but by mistake said “The full Monty”.

For supper, I joined a group of about 25 Jewish FTDNA group administrators who were attending the conference. Many of them I had met for the first time at IAJGS in Orlando last July. It was nice to get together again.

Picture by Adam Brown reprinted with his permission:

Following supper, there was an ISOGG reception downstairs with about 50 people still there when I got there. I finished the evening off with a really nice talk with Tim Janzen. Earlier in the day I had great talks with David Pike, Goran Runfeldt, Janet Akaha and Mags Gaulden. And Brock Shamberg and I had a wonderful talk on stock market investing.

Location: Houston Texas. About 200 genetic genealogists have gathered for 3 days of talks and mingling and discussion about the state of DNA analysis. It’s very exciting for me to be with and talk to so many experts, each with a slightly different viewpoint and their own specialties in this field.

The day started with an early morning breakfast for those of us who had arrived in time. About 20 of us gathered at the Family Tree DNA breakfast buffet which we’ll also be treated to for the next two conference days and the Monday following.

I tried to talk to as many new people I could find. Following breakfast and up to the evening, it was a matter of lounging in the main hall and attendees meeting each other as they came down. I talked with many people from previous conferences I had attended, including Curtis Rogers of GEDmatch who I first met at RootsTech in Salt Lake City in February, Karen Schlussel, Brock Shamberg, Adam Brown, Gil  Bardige, Shelley Talalay Dardashti and Bennett Greenspan who I met at IAJGS in July in Disney World, Mags Gaulden and Derrell Oakley Teat who I spent time with just a month ago in Halifax, and Judy Russell and David Pike from OGS in Toronto in 2016. I still have to talk to Maurice Gleeson who I met at OGS and will surely get a few minutes with him before the conference is over.

In the evening we picked up our lanyard and name badge along with our registration package which included a conference bag, a conference t-shirt, the conference program, and the book “Swabbed and Found” by Frank Billingsley who will be talking to us tomorrow about it.

I got to meet in person for the first time and spend time with Roberta Estes, Roberta’s husband Jim, Jennifer Zinck, Jim Bartlett, Tim Janzen, Debbie Parker Wayne and Goren Runfeldt. Many of the staff from Family Tree DNA are here as well and it’s nice to meet and talk to them.

Tomorrow will be a full day of sessions from 9 am to 5 pm.

Today is my Behold Blog’s 15’th blogiversary.  My first blog post was on Thursday, November 7, 2002.

This blog post commemorating my blogiversary is my 1084th. I’m not as prolific a writer as Randy Seaver or James Tanner, but an average of 72 posts a year, more than one a week, isn’t that bad.

Originally in 2002, I used a beautiful blog template by Eric Costello and manually entered my blog posts into the page.

The template outline and background color morphed, and would slowly change from green to blue to red to brown to yellow to brown to purple to … It was such a lovely thing.

In 2004, once the page was getting fairly large with over a hundred posts, I unfortunately had to remove that unique color morphing because it was slowing down the page display too much.

In July 2004, I developed and added an RSS feed for the Blog.

One problem with my own home-built blog, was that there was no place for user comments. What’s a blog without user interaction? So in December 2004, I opened up a separate discussion forum for discussion of my blog posts. I also developed an RSS feed for the comments.

In March 2005, the single blog page had grown too large. I archived all the entries as another page, still available, but started the blog page anew with new posts.

For years, I only put the date as the title of each of my Blog posts. A bit boring, wouldn’t you say? I switched to descriptive titles in 2007.

In April 2008, after several months of work, along with the redesign of my www.beholdgenealogy.com site, I switched my blog over to Wordpress and customized the heck out of it so that it worked exactly as I wanted it. I moved all the archived posts and comments from the forum into the new blog.

In August 2008, I built a proper user forum for Behold using bbPress 0.8 and integrated its design and user information with my blog.

In December 2008, I was awarded a 2008 GeneaBlog Award by Tamura Jones for the title of "Deepest Genealogy Blog". He wrote: "It does not get more inside than this. Behold is not finished, yet Louis Kessler has been blogging about developing Behold since 2002. Subscribe to witness the birth of Behold version 1.0 real soon now, or just dig into years of posts about developing a genealogy program."

I don’t remember when I joined Thomas MacEntee’s GeneaBloggers group, but I finally added their logo to my blog in January 2012. In June 2017, I moved with everyone else to GeneaBloggers Tribe, after Thomas passed the service to a new group of enthusiastic blog promoting genealogists.

On November 24, 2006, I put up a nice post for my 50th birthday.

On December 31, 2011, I summarized the year after my 55th birthday.

On November 24, 2016, I put up a nice post for my 60th birthday.

15 years down. Umpteen to go.