Viewing Your Data

Half of the main window contains the TreeView.

 

The TreeView should look familiar to you because many other Windows programs (but not too many genealogy programs) make use of it. It is basically an outline of all the data in the Everything Report.

 

Any entries with a "+" before it can be expanded by clicking on the "+" or double clicking the text. Once expanded, the "+" turns into a "-" and it can be collapsed.

 

The number in parenthesis after each entry shows how many entries in total are hidden under the "+" that can be expanded. This is different than the number of items in a section, so don't think that there are only 52 names in the Name Index.

 

The TreeView's main use is to quickly navigate through the Everything Report. When you click on any TreeView line, the Everything Report will scroll to the corresponding information.

 

 

The TreeView can be placed either above the Everything Report, or to the left of it, depending on your preference.

 

You can flip it to the top by either selecting "Tile Top and Bottom" from the View menu, or by clicking on this toolbar item.

 

You can flip it to the left either by selecting "Tile Left and Right" from the View menu, or by clicking on this toolbar item.

 

 

Behold's Everything Report is the central focus of Behold and is the tool that should help you in ways that other program's reports cannot.

 

The Report has three parts:

 

1. The Heading and Table of Contents

2. The Information Area, and

3. Structured Indexes

 

Most genealogy programs have two basic reports and variations of them:

  (1) all ancestors of a given person, and

  (2) all descendants of a given person.

 

But very few programs can show you all relatives of a given person. To do this, you need to show all descendants of every ancestor of a given person. This is what Behold does. In our example, Behold found that there were eight ancestors of Stephen James McCarthy whose descendants would consist of all his relatives.

 

To do this example with other programs, you would have to print out 8 descendant reports - and then you would find that a lot of the people would be repeated twice, three times, or even up to eight times. Stephen James McCarthy and all his descendants would be in every descendant report, so he and his descendants would all be repeated eight times. If you had a genealogy that started with 32 ancestors, then you'd have a real mess.

 

Behold doesn't do this. When Behold encounters the same person again, it simply lists the person and puts a cross reference to the earlier occurrence, so the data is not repeated.

 

Also, Behold is not limited to showing only one family. Behold can show as many families as you want. In the case above, Behold is showing two families: the relatives of Stephen James McCarthy, and the relatives of his wife Dianne Marie [Jack] McCarthy. In this dataset, Dianne's relatives were not included in the GEDCOM. But if they were, they would be listed here starting with all her ancestors. Any crosses between her family and Stephen's family would be taken into account with cross references so no data would be repeated.