Yes, in groupings similar to those shown above (children, grandchildren, nieces/nephews, etc.) That will be in the Report Options of the Organize Pages.

Louis

Thanks for checking the latest version of RM for me. But I really wouldn’t expect that programs would make changes to handle a GEDCOM ambiguity, so however they handle it, that reaction would probably stay embedded into the program until there was an important reason to address it.

Here’s a hint: When I start making blog entries about genealogy programming, it’s usually because I’m back working hard on Behold.

Louis

FWIW

(push) (push) didn’t I hear a hint about a beta?

Still at the mouse hole …

Dave

That video is sort of cool. Follow your rehab instructions well. They know what their doing to get you back to full strenght again. I’m fully recovered with my achilles being 99.9% and just a bit of muscle redistribution in my calf.

Louis

Below is a computer animation of the surgery I had done at OrthoCarolinas in Charlotte, NC. They call it PARS surgery and is apparently highly successful to get full tension back in the achilles. I am 40 years old and pretty active at gym 4-5 days a week and run 5-10k’s a few times a year. Hadn’t played basketball in several years and snapped mine during my third game of the night. Same feeling of being kicked in the leg - but not a lot of pain unless I put weight on it. Hopped to the door and drove my self home after it happened. Getting old stinks. I must say I am a bit nervous about putting weight back on the tendon but will do whatever my surgeon tells me in order to fully recover. Too much life left to live! Good luck with your recovery!

http://www.arthrex.com/resources/animation/sjjcVvkEEeCRTQBQVoRHOw/pars-achilles-jig-system

Louis

Virginia Blakelock
TMG and Behold!

Look forward to meeting you again on the cruise, Louis. Hopefully it won’t be as crazy as Rootstech.

TopTenReviews are not user-based ratings. They are comparisons of programs based on features, and the rating is effectively the decision of a person from TTR. The rating may be influenced by the popularity of the program and possibly by the affiliate commission that TTR would receive. They only include a select list of 10 programs, and there are many more programs than that.

Sites like that are good to compare features and give you a good first idea of what programs you might want to try. But ultimately, you want the program that provides the best usability and benefits that you need.

Louis

In my case, yes I am happy I did not have the surgery. I started playing squash in December, just 4 months after, and was playing full force 2 months after that. During the summer, I rode my bike every day (skipping squash during that time). Here it is a year and a half later, and you’d be hard pressed to tell that I ever had that injury. I’m actually amazed that it worked out this well for me.

I’m in my 50’s so that had a bearing on my decision. Surgery has higher risks for older people. But I was in good shape and knew I would religously follow my physiotherapy instructions.

Check out the lastest information and studies online and see what you think. They may in some places still tend to recommend surgery for younger athletic types since some feel it may heal stronger and have less chance of rerupture. That’s why I was especially surprised that my doctor (who would have been my surgeon) wasn’t willing to make the decision for me.

Louis

Louis

However, the ratings are subjective - and therefore subject to the reviewers biases and experience. My guess is that most reviewers will rate the software that they own and have used. How can they judge it is a 3, 4 or 5 star program?

How many reviewers have actually used more than one software program to do a specific job? I think that I could rate RootsMagic 6, Family Tree Maker 2012, Legacy Family Tree 7.5 and Family Tree Maker 16 fairly because I have a lot of experience with each of them. There are a number of us that could do that, but have we done it? Perhaps a “select panel” of 10 or 20 reviewers could do that and come up with a better ranking of the programs.

My opinion is that some reviewers have given low ratings to some programs out of spite - Family Tree Maker 2008-2012 comes to mind. There is the possibility that a software provider could get a number of friends or employees to rate their software highly.

It is what it is. A software review site with hundreds of reviews each year for each program would be more respected than one with just a few reviews each year. The problem is getting software users to do the reviews.

Thank you for the review opportunity - you can only offer it and hope that it is used and is respected.

Hopefully hard work and preparation mitigate the need for luck.

Louis

Yes. That’s the goal.

I’ll have an initial (and hopefully close to comprehensive) set of checks with some based on age criteria that will be user-settable. When I add editing to Behold, I’ll be including a way to easily override a reported problem for a specific individual and mark it as “confirmed”. There’s no use in adding that yet, because currently there is no way to save that info between runs.

Presumably you have decided on criteria for the checks. What data have you used to arrive at the limits for flagging? There will always be some data that fails the checks, but is correct e.g. a tiny minority of children are born to women over 50.

Thanks for your comments. The questions at Area51 are just proposed example questions, and yes you are correct, that finding other people doing similar research is not one of them listed.

Personally, in addition to the other types of questions, I wouldn’t mind seeing it used the way you suggest. If there were 100,000 family researchers monitoring the Q&A site, we’d all want to be able to find people who are researching common lines.

Maybe we’ll all start adding signatures on our Q’s and A’s with our family names we’re researching like we did during the old bulletin board days, e.g.

Louis Kessler
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Surnames: Braunstein, Focsaner, Kessler, Herman, Goretsky, Kushner, Zaslovsky, Furman, Muchnik
Places: Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Romania, Ukraine

I’m probably not even a “serious amateur”, just a guy with lots of family records and an itch to get them into a computer. I’ve used Legacy for several years and dabbled with Roots Magic, tried to get serious about sources and experienced all the frustrations you’ve promised to relieve in Behold, but I’m a user, not a genealogy philosopher. If the site won’t let me ask questions like “Is anyone working on the John Doe who was born in LeMars Iowa in 1905″, it’s not going to have much relevance for me.

I might go ahead and sign up anyway, just to cast a few votes for establishment, but don’t think I’ll last long. It’s too bad too, because I’ve been trying to find a path between lust for the resources of Ancestry et al with antipathy toward the prevalent model where individuals find and publish the data for free, and company X gets rich from it. I’ve looked (briefly) at several of the previous and current attempts to to provide non-profit venues for public exposure, but it seems there’s always a loop hole or an ulterior motive.

(If that got too far off-topic, feel free to edit or delete.)

Regards - Dave

I remember Everton. They had a very good magazine and did a lot for the genealogical community.

As far as the Q&A site goes, once it’s up and into Beta, it will be the participants themselves who judge the quality of your questions. Your question will be upvoted if good, and downvoted if bad. Others can edit your question to make it more clear or add better tags - which you can undo if you don’t agree. And people can comment on your question possibly with suggestions you should make to it.

The answers to your questions will be equally graded by others, and you can then indicate the answer you’ve chosen as best for you.

It’s an interesting scheme that, from my experience with StackOverflow, seems to work well.

Louis

One concerned finding the precise location of a town along the border between Oklahoma and Arkansas (I specialize in Virginia/West Virginia) that does not appear on modern maps. I suggested the Postal Site Application and Report files for Arkansas and Oklahoma knowing not only that those files often contained lists of the communities served, if not detailed maps of the area, but also that a post office often had a different name than the town in which it was located with the post office name often being the name that survived.

I was later informed that the individual found the answer to his question in those records!

I participated in that program in no small part because even though queries could be asked at no cost, there was also a paid option and the queries also resulted in my getting paid research assignments. I might well see such assignments by participating in this new program, but I saw nothing as I explored the same that offered that option.

When it comes to genealogy there is a clear overall bias on the internet against promoting any fee-based services other than Ancestry or a like company that is primarily offering access to data, and generally “second-hand”, rather than actual research.

Granted, with this still being an alpha, it is perhaps premature to expect a “referral” option, but without a stipulation that the same is intended, I would expect most of the people who would be answering the queries to be amateurs.

I have nothing against amateurs per se, for they still dominate genealogical “publishing”, and I know more than a few “amateurs” I consider to be more competent than individuals who call themselves “professional genealogists”.

Even with the moderation at Everton.com, I was struck by the frequency with which the answers were, if well-intentioned, misinformed.

If questions are to be “removed” for being too specific, will they also be removed for being “WRONG”? I note that it is stipulated that with time, an answer receiving the most votes with move to the top. That suggests to me that any given answer may never be removed, but if it would be, what criteria would be used for making that determination? I don’t know that I like the idea of it being strictly the “most vote” because a “lie” can come to be regarded as “truth” if repeated often enough.

Looking over the sample questions at the actual beta site, along with some of the remarks/explanation for closings, I am concerned that the majority of posted questions are TOO VAGUE, providing too little information for a succinct reply, and I suspect there will be no active moderation to direct a question to a suitable expert.

Quite frankly, without such moderation I would not participate because I suspect that in the majority of instances where I would ask for further information, the detail provided would suggest that I not actually try to answer the question.

For example, I saw only one query that stipulated a specific place and few that gave a time frame. AT A MINIMUM, finding genealogical information in Virginia would require both a date range and location.

The date range is needed to determine whether the information is likely to exist.

For example, civil registration of births and deaths do not begin in Virginia until 1853, with is a gap for most localities from 1896 and 1912, and second, what restrictions on access may apply, there being, for example, an 100 privacy restriction on births.

Prior to 1853, finding a birth date would be largely dependent on locating a tombstone, Bible or church record, though other options are also available, but the tombstone may have been destroyed by nature or man if the family could even have afforded to have one erected, the Bible lost in a fire or discarded because it was handed down through a family that did not have an interest in its history when the surname was different, and most churches do not keep records of birth dates of members.

In Virginia in particular, a location is needed since Virginia is the not the one place in the United States where a city is INDEPENDENT of a county even if completely surrounding it (the 5 boroughs of NYC come closest to the same), so there are multiple places were a given record might be recorded.

Until 1974, the Henrico County, Virginia, courthouse was located both in the city of Richmond and roughly 4 blocks from the city courthouse. I have seen in my almost 40 years as a professional genealogist numerous instances where a record that should have been recorded in Henrico County was actually recorded in the city of Richmond and vice versa. There is also a Richmond County. Indeed, there are both a city and county in Virginia named Bedford, Franklin, Fairfax and Roanoke, and like Richmond city and County, Franklin city and County are NOT contiguous.

I recently found an adoption record for a client in the General Court for the city of Richmond. I routinely find such records in a county in its County Court, for which until the adoption of the current state constitution the equivalent court in a city was the Hustings Court!

There are also Virginia towns with the same name as a Virginia county, Washington coming immediately to mind, though the town of Washington would have few records specifically for the town, yet one will find quite a few records there by virtue of the fact it is the seat for the government of Rappahannock County!

To make matters more confusing, there are still a James City and Charles City that are actually COUNTIES, Elizabeth City that was a county but is now a city named HAMPTON, and Alexandria County, now called Arlington, that was distinctly different from the city of Alexandria though they did adjoin, and many mistakenly presume to be a city when it is still a COUNTY.

While these comments might be better posted at the alpha-site given your comments about the requisites for establishing a beta, I suspect that those who share my opinion might never see them if I were to post on the alpha, quite possibly because they would be classified as “off topic”.

If you could sign up at the site Proposal site and vote for some questions, that will help get it to Beta phase and once in Beta we’ll actually have a site to use. See my detailied instructions at:
https://plus.google.com/106257958448273208907/posts/GAYKVrtMWGH

Louis

It’s the display of data with the Life/Family events shown that I hope you’ll like. When the data input finally comes, I’m sure that part will blow you and everyone else away. Source-based data entry on top of that should be just what’s needed.

I used slide rules, too. But I was much more blown away by my recent switch from from camera/cellphone combination to smartphone!

Louis

So, how many versions have been called 1.1, or should that have been:
The next version, to be called 1.1, will be released soon —-heeheehee

But seriously, keep up the good work and the small course corrections.

I eagerly await 1.1

Behold does some of that already. If there are no dates, then births will come first, then living events, then the death, and then a few post-death events (burial, cremation).

But in the long run, I think all dates (for at least births and marriages) should be estimated as best as possible and indicated as estimated. I hope to allow an option in the future for Behold to do the estimation for you. This would be very valuable, because it will point out inconsistencies and possible problems in your research.

Louis

Tony