Section 2 - People and Facts

This line begins a new family and displays the name of the person whose relatives make up this family, and his/her number to help manually locate this person in the report. The name is a hyperlink and will take you directly to the person. If this person has parents, then he/she will not be first in the file. One of his/her ancestors will be. 

 

Note: Names are displayed in Behold as given in the data file. "McCARTHY" is capitalized only because it was that way in the file. Behold tries to display your data as correctly as possible to help you identify errors and anomalies.

 

This line starts each section and lists the earliest ancestor (and spouse if known) for this family line. The details for this ancestor will immediately follow.

 

The details for each person and their spouse are grouped together and separated from other people by a dividing line.

 

The number identifying this person and spouse in this run is shown at the right of the dividing line. This number is especially useful in printouts, making it easy to quickly locate someone.

 

 

The information is divided into one or two parts, using a blank line as a separator.

1. The person and all the details about the person, and

2. The person's spouse/partner who, if they had any children together, is the other parent of the immediately following descendant lines.

 

If the person does not have a spouse/partner or if there is no information about the spouse/partner, then the spouse/partner is not shown.

Information about both spouses, including events such as marriage and residence are included with both spouses. This presents the events in each person's life in the context of that person.

 

 

Each item of information starts on a new line. Some information may take more than one line and those other lines are indented and organized for best viewing.

 

Raw information is made up of pairs of tag text and data. The tag text can be customized on the Organize Tags Page.

 

Some information is derived from linkages in the data and presented in a useful way, such as the birth information of children.

 

Items shown in grey are "hidden" which means they are unchecked on the Tags Page. You can easily toggle whether to display the hidden text in grey, or whether to hide the hidden text completely by selecting from the menu: View -> Selected tags / All tags, or by clicking on its associated toolbar icon that looks like a checkmark:

The "Section 2 (continued)" of the screen shot shows more of the infrmation area with only Selected tags showing (meaning the hiddent tags are really hidden.

 

Within the details of a person will be links to other people: their spouse, children, parents and any other people referenced within their data.

 

These direct links make it easy to navigate to another person, who may not necessarily be close by in the report. The numbering for the person is a quick indication as to how far away physically in the report that person may be, and allows you to find them more easily while scrolling through the report, or in a printout.

 

 

Source references are directly included with the data in Behold. This allows you to ensure that your sources and data make sense together..

 

Behold numbers your sources for you to make it easy to find them in the Source Details section. (e.g. S5) and then adds a sequential number to represent the specific information in that source (e.g. the -1). Together, the Source Description is in blue meaning it is a hyperlink to take you to that source in the Source Details section. Any other information included in the reference from the event to the source is also shown. This is where you should include your analysis of the source and your reasoning about how you used the source to help derive your current conclusion.

 

 

Almost every item of information begins with a specific "event" or "fact".

 

The usual way an event is thought of is as something that takes place on a specific date or a specific place, such as a birth or a marriage.  A fact is usually thought of as something that is constant over a certain time period such as someone's sex or the color of their hair or their phone number.

 

Usually you don't have to worry whether something is an event or if it a fact. The two are very similar and quite interchangable.

 

 

Events are usually followed by the date the event occurred on. Facts are sometimes followed by the date the fact was true. But there are many variations of this. A date can be a period of time, an estimated time, a date and a time, or one of many different forms. Behold, where possible, will also show the age of the person at the time of the event.

 

Most dates are shown in "DD mon YYYY" format because that is the normal standard way they are stored in most GEDCOM files. That is a good format, since there will never be a confusion between the day and the month.

 

 

Places should be listed in order of smallest jurisdiction up to largest separated by commas. The example above lists City, County, State. Exactly what the jurisdictions should be is not always the same in different genealogy files, but you should try to make them consistent within your data file.

 

 

Places are shown as a blue hyperlink and link directly to that place in the Place Details section.