An ancestral loop is where a person is their own ancestor. This can happen if you by mistake add your grandparent to be a child of your grandson. That may sound like a farfetched thing to do, but mistakes can happen, especially when relatives have identical or similar names. These mistakes often happen when people use matching capabilities that some programs provide – another reason to avoid merging data.

Enno was kind enough to let me use the file he was having trouble with. Behold found 14 loops in that file. But I realized it wasn’t correct. Some loops were being missed. Also the report wasn’t as helpful as it could be, so it’s been rewritten and included, not in the log file, but in its own section of the Everything Report. It’s a data problem, not a GEDCOM problem. So you need to see it.

Now that corrections have been made, Behold now finds 26 loops with 202 people. That included only 123 different people, so many of the people were in multiple loops.

If your program has ancestral loops, then you’ll want to repair those problems.The new section, titled “Ancestral Loops’” will be found just before the File Information. It will only be included if your program has ancestral loops. Check it out. You might be surprised. Of the 421 test files that I have run through Behold, I found that 35 of the log files included the old message indicating at least one loop in that file. That may be indicative that 8% of you may have a loop in your data.

My friend Andy Hatchett a while ago gave me a test GEDCOM which he calls his BetaBeast. It’s got 365,036 lines in it with 21,998 people and is messed up on purpose to torture us programmers. I was going to issue this release earlier today, but BetaBeast stopped me. I had to rewrite the ancestral loops routine to spit out the results in pieces so that Behold wouldn’t freeze. BetaBeast had 2,727 ancestral loops in it. There were 3,829 unique people in those loops. But some people were in many different loops as they crossed nearly everywhere. Those 2,727 loops contained 1,522,771 people! Wow! But Behold was able to handle it, and produce a clear and complete report of all the loops.

The process to code this was very interesting. I’ll be writing a blog post about that over the weekend.

This new code, plus a fair number of minor changes and fixes, are included in version 1.0.5 which is now available.

I determined then, that what I was doing was simply listing the important people who were living at the person’s birth. I thought about it and realized that was an necessary list to have. These people are all affected by the birth, and that newborn’s life is influenced and shaped by the context of who is in their life.

Similarly, I realized that the people alive at a person’s marriage will likely have been to the marriage, or at least invited to the marriage, and researching each of those people may provide further clues into the newlywed’s life.

Likewise, the people alive at a person’s death are affected by that person’s death. Many may have been to the funeral, some travelling to get there. Many of them are likely listed in the obituary. Having a list of the important people and comparing them to those in the obituary could prove to be very useful.

So having a list of the “important” people in a person’s life who are alive at a specific event can help your research. What I needed to figure out was how to best present this and how to order the people.

The one pseudo-standard I have found is the ordering of the survivors and the predeceased as are listed in obituaries. Generally the survivors are listed first followed by those predeceased but some obituaries list predeceased first. Within each group, there is a generally followed order that I’ve identified to be:

• spouse/partner
• child (spouse) … child (spouse)
• grandchild (spouse) … grandchild (spouse)
• great-grandchildren
• parents
• sibling (spouse) … sibling (spouse)
• nieces and nephews
• great nieces and great nephews
• parent-in-laws (e.g. spouse’s parents)
• spouses’ siblings
• step-parents
• step-siblings
• grandparents
• uncles and aunts
• cousins
• other relatives
• extended family
• friends

Put together as two drawn-out sentences, the information in an obituary often looks like this:

She is survived by daughter Catherine (Ed), son Joseph (Hilary), and son Stan, grandchildren Teresa, Michael (Sophie) and Marie (John), 7 great-grandchildren, sister Connie (Larry), sister-in-law Judy, numerous nieces, nephews and friends. She was predeceased by her son Blake, her parents Paul and Jessie and her sister Olive.

There are many informal “rules” for this listing. When there are many relatives high on the list, the ones following are often not all listed, with sometimes the number of them given (e.g. 12 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchild and many cousins and friends). Half siblings and adoptions are usually not mentioned as such but are listed along with the full siblings and full children.

Additional information is sometimes provided in obituaries, such as years of marriage, married names, city of residence and ages of descendants which makes obituaries wonderful source of information for researchers.

So why is this “snapshot” information not available in most genealogy programs? Probably because most developers haven’t found a good place to put it, or they realized it is a lot of work to implement. If they do have it, then they’d make you look at this information one person or maybe even one event at a time.

Behold is going to generate this for everyone for the types of events (birth / marriage / death) that you want. It will be more comprehensive than the simple obituary list above and should prove very useful, hopefully without being too overwhelming. This will be in version 1.1. I’m hoping the final consensus will be that this is an important and necessary feature to have.

It includes one small fix for a particular type of date that rarely occurs but two people have now encountered it. It’s bad because it causes Behold to be unable to read the GEDCOM file and gives an Access Violation and crashes.

The type of GEDCOM date that causes the problem is:

2 DATE INT 1861 ()

That is an interpreted date and the parenthesis is supposed to contain the text that is interpreted. In this particular case, there is no text, and when I check in Behold what is in the first character, it gives the Access Violation because it is looking in memory that is a no-no.

Unfortunately, the way Delphi (my programming language) handles this is with an exception to the program which crashes it. I can turn these access violation checks off, but it’s not a good idea because it indicates that something is being done wrong and needs to be fixed. I can turn it off in the release versions, but then the program may crash anyway but without being able to tell what the cause was.

Behold has very few of these type of crashes left in it. This was a rarely used date construct that was not output correctly (by RootsMagic in this case because GEDCOM requires at least 1 character between the parenthesis) and I hadn’t encountered it before in my testing.

The solution is easy for me. Before I check what is in the first character, I simply need to ensure that there is at least 1 character. It’s a fairly trivial fix and this is one bit of code where I had just missed making that fix. But now it’s done.

The reason why it’s version 1.0.4.3 was because I earlier had privately released version 1.0.4.1 (which improved sorting of Unicode fonts) and 1.0.4.2 which had this bug fix. 1.0.4.3 removed a bit of the sorting code that was doubling the time Behold was taking to load.

This 1.0.4.3 version is not a required download. You probably won’t notice anything whether you have it or don’t have it.

What I’m really working on and still promise to get to you as soon as possible, is version 1.1. The Life Events are coming together. That along with the ages and sorting of events and consistency checking, will make this a very important release.

Hopefully by the end of April (and I hope that’s not an April fool’s joke either).

The lines in GEDCOM 5.5.1 under consideration are these:

The order in which GEDCOM lines are written to a GEDCOM file is controlled by the context and level number. When the lines are of equal level number but have a different tag name then the order is not significant. The occurrence of equal level numbers and equal tags within the same context imply that multiple opinions or multiple values of the data exist. The significance of the order in these cases is interpreted as the submitter’s preference. The most preferred value being the first with the least preferred data listed in subsequent lines by order of decreasing preference. For example, a researcher who discovers conflicting evidence about a person’s birth event would list the most credible information first and the least credible or least preferred items last.

Systems that support multiple fields or structures should allow their users to indicate their information (the first occurrence listed) and store the remaining information as an exception, preferably within an appropriate NOTE field or in some way that the patron has ready access to the less-preferred data when viewing the record.

Conflicting event dates and places should be represented by placing them in separate event structures with appropriate source citations rather than by placing them under the same enclosing event.

What this means is that if you have two conflicting sets of information for an event, such as a birth event, then there should be separate event structures for them, e.g.:

1 BIRT
2 DATE 1880
1 BIRT
2 DATE 1870

Presumably you’d have more information with each including the full dates, the places, your sources and notes about each bit of evidence. Because of the GEDCOM rule, the first of the two would be considered the preferred, i.e. most credible date.

This is all fine and good for events like Birth and Death that, other than extremely extended circumstances (e.g. brought back from a coma, or science fiction), normally occur only once in any person’s life.

The trouble is that almost any other event can occur multiple times in a person’s life: adoption, naturalization, census, education, retirement. There have been people who have had multiple baptisms and even multiple burials.

This results in a problem. For events other than Birth and Death, if the events are represented like the 4-line GEDCOM example above, how do you tell if they are two different events of the same type, or if they are two sets of conflicting information about the same event?

The answer is, you can’t. GEDCOM does not explain how to distinguish the difference.

Therefore, in Behold, I’ll be going out on the limb and assuming multiple events listed are different events, except in the case of births and deaths where they’ll represent conflicting information for the same event.

You can see some of my earlier discussion about this when I was first considering the ordering of events.

—

That got me to wonder about marriages. The marriage event is considered to be the other “important” event in pure genealogy (not family history) research. Surely, people will want to show conflicting sets of marriage information.

Using the reasoning above, a person may get married multiple times. So a marriage is not a unique event in a person’s life. And the above reasoning says you cannot distinguish whether two MARR tags refer to one marriage or to different marriages.

But marriages are different because they are not associated with a individual (INDI) record. Instead they are associated with two people via a FAM record.

The FAM record was unfortunately misnamed as people always refer to it as a family of a husband and wife and their children. I’ll leave the definition of a “family” for some other discussion. Instead I’ll refer to what GEDCOM says about the FAM record:

The FAMily record is used to record marriages, common law marriages, and family unions caused by two people becoming the parents of a child. There can be no more than one HUSB/father and one WIFE/mother listed in each FAM_RECORD. If, for example, a man participated in more than one family union, then he would appear in more than one FAM_RECORD. The family record structure assumes that the HUSB/father is male and WIFE/mother is female.

So a FAM record is really a union of two people becoming the parents of a child. Whether or not they get married is irrelevant. Whether or not there is no more than one male and one female parent is technically irrelevant (there can be same-sex couples adopting a child) but GEDCOM requires it (Boooo).

By this definition, there can be one FAM record for every child. It’s a mosh-posh because events about the two parents (engagement, residence, census, divorce) are included with the FAM record. If there was a FAM record for every child, the two parents would be repeated multiple times and which one would you assign their combined events to? So the general implementation adopted by most developers is that one union with all their children would be put together in a single FAM record.

Now my question: What happens if two people break up and then get together again? There may be a second marriage event for the same two people. Does that go into one FAM record, or do you create two FAM records with it?

This is a key question. If you create one FAM record, then there can be more than one marriage event in the record and you will no longer be able to tell conflicting marriage information apart from two separate marriage events. But if they go in two FAM records, then there will be only one marriage event per FAM record.

What about the children from the remarriage? The children will be full brothers and sisters with those from the first marriage since they have the same parents. That reasoning would suggest just having one FAM record.

But there may be an intervening marriage with someone else in between, which could also result in children. Should there then be 3 FAM records or only 2.

The answer again is that again GEDCOM doesn’t help you and tell you how to do this. So the developers all had to decide for themselves.

Tamura Jones suggested to me that I test this out myself with some of the more popular genealogy programs and see what they do. Do they accept the data either way? Do they then output the data the same way? Maybe I can generalize a “best practice” from this.

So I built a tricky little 84 line GEDCOM file that I’ll try on several programs. It’s got Guy Main who marries Gal One and has MarriageOne Child. They divorce and he marries Gal Two and has MarriageTwo Child. The end of their marriage isn’t described but he then remarries his first wife Gal One again and they have MarriageThree Child. Just for fun, each of the three families has two marriage dates, a preferred date and an alternate date, and the one divorce also has a preferred date and an alternate date. Onto Guy Main, I’ve also added a preferred and alternate birth date and two census dates that shouldn’t be treated as preferred and alternate, but as two separate events.

Hmm. In setting this up, I ran it through Behold. Behold finds no problems with the GEDCOM file. However, I noticed some things the most recent version of Behold does wrong in displaying this file that’s already been fixed in my development version.

For a second check, I ran the GEDCOM through Tim Forsythe’s VGedX program. It complains only about too few ADDR tags, but I think that is wrong on VGedX’s part. And I ran it through Tim Forsythe’s Bonkers program, which says there’s no problems.

Now let’s see how some other programs handle it:

1. PAF 5.1.7.0

No errors reported on import.

- Treats the first birth date and first marriage date as the preferred one.
- Lists 3 spouses. (That’s when you click an “Other Marriages” button that is misnamed and should say “All Marriages”).
- Guy Main lists 3 other events: The alternate birth and the two census events.
- Notes are shown together for Guy Main, rather than on each event. Bad!
- Gal One marriage has alternate marriage and 2 divorces but dates are missing.
- Notes are shown together for marriage, rather than on each event. Bad!
- Exported marriages correctly.
- Exported preferred marriage date only. It did not export the divorce date, but somehow got it messed up because of the notes added to the marriage and divorce events. Bad!

Attempting to add another marriage of Guy Main to Gal One gives a message box saying: “Gal One-2 is already in a marriage with Guy Mail-1. Do you want to create another marriage for them anyway?” This indicates that PAF prefers separate FAM records for remarriages of the same couple.

Conclusion: PAF understands preferred birth dates and preferred marriage dates but does not designate them as such. A remarriage is better as a separate FAM because PAF may mess up multiple marriages within one FAM.

2. RootsMagic 4.0.9.7

Nothing mentioned in its .lst file after import.

- Treats the first birth date and first marriage date as the preferred one.
- Lists 3 spouses.
- Guy main shows all events in date order. This is confusing because there are 2 births, 2 census and 6 marriages listed. You can’t tell which is primary and which is alternate here.
- Exports events in date order. It loses the preferential birth and marriage. Bad!
- Exports lots of extra junk in its default GEDCOM. 651 lines long. Bad!

Attempting to add another marriage of Guy Main to Gal One gives a message box saying: “These two people are already linked as a couple. If they were married twice to each other you can add a second marriage fact.” and it won’t let you add it! This indicates that RootsMagic must think the alternate marriage date is in fact a separate marriage event.

Conclusion: RootsMagic indicates it prefers one couple married twice to be two events under the same couple. RootsMagic does not handle alternate marriage dates but thinks of those as separate marriage events. It really doesn’t handle preferred and alternate birth dates either.

3. Legacy 7.5

The import box is sloppy and displays: “Individuals:6” without a space between the colon and the 6. That is just sloppy. But no messages are displayed.

- Legacy understands preferred and alternate birth events and lists the latter as an “Alt. birth” event. Excellent!
- Census events are listed as two separate events.
- Legacy understands preferred and alternate marriage and divorce events and lists them as such. Excellent!
- Unfortunately, Legacy has the first marriage set to preferred obviously to indicate who to include in reports. Is there such a thing as a “preferred” marriage? The wording “preferred” is inappropriate here.

Attempting to add another marriage of Guy Main to Gal One gives a message box saying: “Gal One [2] is already his wife. Do you want to link her again?” but it allows you to and creates a new FAM record.

Conclusion: Legacy understands preferred and alternate events the way GEDCOM may have intended. It thus prefers additional marriages to be in separate FAM records so that marriage and divorce dates within one.

4. Family Tree Maker 2008 (sorry, I don’t have a newer version).

I had the GEDCOM file marked as GEDCOM 5.5.1, so FTM gave the message: “GEDCOM file must be version 5.5 or greater” and would not read it. So I changed the 5.5.1 to 5.5 and reimported the file. No errors in the log file.

- FTM as did the other programs, correctly treated the first event as primary.
- FTM show the birth and marriage and divorce events and displays which are preferred. This, like Legacy, is the way GEDCOM may have intended it.
- FTM merges the info about Guy Main’s marriages to Gal One together, indicating its understanding that this is the same person who Guy Main remarried. This is excellent as none of the other three programs denoted this.
- However, the two Census events were listed with the first one as preferred. This is bad since it doesn’t indicate an understanding that there may be more than one event of this type.
- Although FTM tried to indicate its “smarts” about knowing that it married Gal One twice, on the Relationships page, it indicates that Gal One is now “Spouse – Divorced” and Gal Two is “Spouse – Ongoing” which is wrong, since Gal One has been remarried since the divorce. If FTM noted the order of the FAMS tags, it would have got this right.
- Exported the alternate birth first and the primary birth second. Bad.
- Exported only one of the two marriage and divorce dates. Bad.
- FTM 2008 crashed once while I was picking another tab in it.

Attempting to add another marriage of Guy Main to Gal One gives a message box saying: “These people cannot be attached because one of them is already in a direct relationship of the other.” And it won’t let you do it. This is despite its seeming understanding that that Guy Main married Gal One twice. Since FTM recognizes primary marriages and forces you to put a remarriage under the same person, the other marriages will have to be non-primary and you will no longer be able to tell if they are alternatives of the same marriage, or a real new marriage. Too bad.

Conclusion: At least FTM indicates the primary event. But it does everything else wrong.

Overall Conclusion: This is one horrible exercise to do. Since GEDCOM isn’t clear about what to do, everyone has implemented it differently.

To me Legacy does it best. But to settle on one way that’s incompatible with everyone else is not really a good idea. The real solution may have to wait until a new standard to replace GEDCOM is created, one that will have a more rigorous way of defining preferred and alternate information for an event, and how to properly handle the various types of unions.

Below is a set of best practices as I see them. The format of this is inspired by Tamura who originated the idea.

—

Best Practice

GEDCOM reader

• Multiple BIRT or DEAT events in an INDI record should be treated as a single birth or death with conflicting sets of information.
• The order of the BIRT and DEAT events should be treated as the user’s judgemental ranking from most likely correct to least likely correct (or even incorrect).
• All other event/fact types that occur multiple times within an INDI record should be treated as separate events/facts.
• Multiple MARR or DIV events in a FAM record should be treated as a single marriage or divorce with conflicting sets of information.
• The order of the MARR and DIV events should be treated as the user’s judgemental ranking from most likely correct to least likely correct (or even incorrect).
• All other event/fact types that occur multiple times within a FAM record should be treated as separate events/facts.
• Two or more FAM records with the same HUSB and WIFE should be treated as multiple unions of the same two people. No warning should be issued. Children of these FAMs are full siblings and should be displayed as such.

GEDCOM validator

• Do not give any messages for allowed multiple events/facts of any type.
• Do not give any messages for multiple FAM records with the same HUSB and WIFE.

GEDCOM writer

• Export multiple BIRT or DEAT events in an INDI record when there is conflicting information, ordered from most likely correct to least likely.
• Export multiple MARR or DIV events in a FAM record when there is conflicting information, ordered from most likely correct to least likely.
• For all other events/facts, export multiple events of one type only when they are separate events/facts.
• Create a separate FAM record for each remarriage/reunion of a couple after they have divorced or otherwise separated and then got together again. Attach the children to the appropriate marriage/union.

Future GEDCOM Standard

• Eliminate the ambiguity caused by multiple events being allowed to represent conflicting information in some cases, but different events in other cases. Make conflicting information a substructure of the preferred event. Then multiple events will always represent different events.
• The current FAM record is defined as a marriage/union of a man and woman becoming a parent. This definition is wrong in many ways and the implication that it represents a family is misleading. Change the structure to be a UNI (union) of two (or more) people for any purpose. Allow same-sex couples. Don’t require a child but do allow them.
• Change the HUSB/WIFE tags to be a non-sex INDI tag. Whether INDI is a husband or wife will be able to be inferred by the sex of the person being pointed to and if the couple has a MARR event.

For those who can’t be there, the live streaming that takes place from Room 1, the big room where the Keynotes talk, gives a good selection of presentations to give everyone a good cross-section of a range of topics.

Here’s a few of my observations from the first two days.

Last year, the first Keynote was Jay Verkler, the at the time outgoing CEO of FamilySearch who was handing the reins over to Dennis Brimhall who also spoke. Jay spoke like a visionary, of all the things he had been trying to put in place, but would no longer be in control of doing.

This year Dennis Brimhall spoke. He had much less enthusiastic vision, but takes a more direct businesslike stance. This definitely is going to be an interesting shift for FamilySearch. I don’t see it as being either better or worse. But it’s different. Change is often good, so by next year, we’ll see.

Then it was very interesting watching Syd Lieberman and Josh Taylor. Both were talking about the power of stories. Genealogy is more than just genealogy.

Technology-wise, I was unhappy that the presentations were not visible on my Windows Phone. They are Adobe Flash videos, which unfortunately Adobe has decided that it is no longer developing a mobile version. Then, I was meeting an out-of-town friend at noon, which mean’t I’d be missing the 11 a.m. Future of Genealogy Panel. But I was very happy when I got back from lunch, that the streaming videos had the full stream in them, and you could go back to any point and start from there.

I was really looking forward to The Future of Genealogy panel, moderated by Thomas MacEntee with panelists Josh Taylor, Lisa Louise Cooke, Daniel Horowitz, Dear Myrtle, Alan Phillips and Dick Eastman. The most interesting answer to me was that of Daniel Horowitz who made the point that we cannot generalize the people who are genealogists. Every one of us is different and we each do our genealogy differently.

At the 3 p.m. streamed presentation, Jill Ball led a panel through each of their technological gadget bags. I had spent an enjoyable 8 days with Jill (and Alan Phillips from the earlier panel as well) on the Unlock the Past genealogy cruise last month.

A week ago, Jill posted on her blog her trepidation about moderating that session after she realized that it was going to be on the live feed. But she had nothing to worry about. She did fine!

At the 4 p.m. session, it was nice to listen to James Tanner who produces great genealogy posts on his blog: Genealogy’s Star. I was quite surprised to read what James wrote today about his interest in the Family History Information Standards Organization (FHISO). Hopefully he’ll get more involved with it.

Speaking of FHISO, there’s lots of activity going on for it at RootsTech this year. As a signal of FHISO’s commencement of open standards development work, FHISO announced their Call For Papers. And they’ve got their own booth in the exhibition hall. FHISO had an Open Standards panel today that included Bruce Buzbee, Josh Taylor, Drew Smith, Joshua Harman, Patrick Jones and Robert Burkhead. Here’s a picture of Gordon Clarke of FamilySearch talking to three of the panelists. This FHISO panel is the one event that I’m missing most by not being at RootsTech this year.

Today’s keynote included Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com. Tim was very “nice” to FamilySearch this year, especially when you compare to his keynote last year when he said in as many words that Ancestry and FamilySearch were competitors. I did note that he did not mention at all the purchase of Ancestry.com by Permira late last year for $1.6 billion and any benefits that might bring to the company. I also very much enjoyed Jyl Pattee’s keynote.

Today, the winners of the RootsTech Developer Challenge were announced. There were winners in 3 categories.

In the “Find” category, the winner was BrowseHero (Tom Auga & Chris Giesey), a Windows utility that  shows the FamilySearch website and adds features to the FamilySearch interface that includes a Full Family Graph and the ability to find errors and maintain local research notes.

In the “Preserve” category, the winner was Our Family Health by Jaehoon Lee. This is not a publicly available tool yet, but they do have some demos. I think genealogy software does need to track health information, and it should also track DNA, pets, non-family relationships and all the stories that make up family history. Maybe I can get Behold to evolve to one day include it all. By the way, there does appear to be one other programs out there now that I’ve got listed on GenSoftReviews that does family health history: ItRunsInMyFamily.com

In the “Show” category, the winner was Treelines.com by Tammy Hepps. Tammy’s program also won the best overall out of the three winners.

The one other session I was really happy that was livestreamed was Ron Tanner’s FamilySearch Family Tree presentation. Ron is unapologetic in his presentation of Family Tree. He’s the project manager and he’s determined. He tells you what they want to do, but that they’re not there yet. Ron is also a hilarious presenter and a must-see. If he decided he wanted another job other than at FamilySearch, he could easily become a stand-up comedian.

That basically sums up what I thought of the first two streaming days of RootsTech. There is a lot going on at the conference. Lots of people are blogging about it and during these 3 frantic days, it’s hard to keep up with it all. Although I tend to hate the automated news-gatherer websites, I’ve found over the last two days that RebelMouse’s RootsTech2013 feed is the best to get the widest variety of tidbits.

The worst thing about the conference, as is true with most great conferences, will be the end of it tomorrow. Don’t forget to watch the keynotes tomorrow morning and read all the blogs for the follow up.

You can either try other programs that may work better for you, or you don’t have to use them at all. People were doing genealogy way before computers were around, so you don’t need to use them. Just do the research, make sure you document everything, and someone in the family will eventually take it up and do the computer entry for you and the family.

So I ran into a similar problem for myself with regards to the pictures I was taking during the trip. I wanted to post the pictures and videos in the cloud so that my family could see them. The hope was that I could post them each night, and they could experience our trip along with us.

Surely technology would now allow this, I thought. My friend in Vancouver had posted hundreds of pictures of his trips up on Google Albums using Google Picasa and that seems to work so well.

I’m a Windows guy. For the trip, I was now going to use my Windows phone (a Nokia Lumia 920) for my pictures and videos. The plan was to upload them to my SkyDrive which is part of my Windows Live account. The phone has built in syncing of pictures/videos with the SkyDrive so this should be a snap, right?

I merrily starting taking an average of 100 photos and 5 to 10 videos a day. Our hotel room in Sydney had wifi. So now, just Sync pics/videos from phone to SkyDrive. First problem: Wifi’s too slow. Moving 500 MB of files takes a while. Fortunately the hotel room also has hardwired internet. We plug the laptop in, transfer the pics to the laptop, and up they go somewhat faster.

Hmm. Several problems. First, they are ordered weird. Panoramas (taken with a fantastic Nokia feature) and videos were not in the correct place. Their date-times are not set. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to reorder them on SkyDrive since it wasn’t obvious figuring out how to do that and then they’ve got to be moved one by one. Dragging a picture and scrolling the screen down at the same time was nearly impossible but it got done with effort. Later I found I could order the pics by file name and that gave a better order – just the videos had inconsistent names and had to be renamed, which was easier than reordering one by one on SkyDrive.

Then I needed to label the pics and videos with a caption. I went through them on SkyDrive and added captions, realizing when I was done that most didn’t get entered because I used the arrow key to move to the next picture, but needed to hit enter to save the caption prior to moving on. So I had to redo them.

That worked for the 5 days prior to the cruise. Once we were on the cruise, I no longer had wired internet – only a slower wifi. But it didn’t matter anyway. I was too busy and exhausted at the end of each day to try to do the pictures, and settled on just getting a blog entry up every day or two. Each blog entry took almost 10 minutes to upload because of the slow ship wifi, but at least they got posted.

After the cruise, we were back at the hotel with wired internet again. But I was now 10 days and 1200 pictures behind. Rather than upload them, I decided I’d just organize them on the laptop first, and then upload them later. I used Windows Live Photo Gallery to do so. This allowed organizing the photos on the laptop, deleting and moving them around, captioning them, and even identifying and marking the people in each photo. I then used WLPG to upload them to SkyDrive. But there were so many that I didn’t finish. Once I got home, I went to my desktop computer and organized the rest of them in WLPG and then uploaded them.

Okay. Sounds like they’re all up there. But all sorts of problems. Somehow none of the captions for the videos got uploaded. I had to go and manually add them onto the videos on SkyDrive. Little did I know, but WLPG didn’t upload full size pictures or videos. The videos were compressed so much, they are noticeably lower in quality. And all the video uploads from my computer were missing the sound, but not from the laptop. So I had to redo all those, but do them from the laptop. The reason, I assume is that my desktop is Windows Vista, which didn’t have the updated Codec for the compression format, whereas the Laptop was Windows 7 which did. Sheesh!

Now I’ve got a big mess. Yes the pics are now up on my SkyDrive for my family and are organized and have the captions and the poor ones I don’t want are not included there. I can’t sync that back down because they are not top quality. I’ve got some pics organized on my desktop but not all, and some on the laptop but not all, and all are still on my camera in full resolution but not organized. I want one permanent full-resolution, organized version with captions and marked people on my desktop. I’m resigned to the fact that there will be no easy way to take the inconsistent pieces and merge the information. It’s just going to take some more manual labor on my part.

This should not have happened this way, and now that I know better, I’ll try to figure a better way so that this won’t happen again in the future. You always learn from your mistakes. No pain, no gain. Just don’t keep on going through the same aggravation over and over.

Theresa is doing a one-place study. She needs software that can do source-based data entry. She needs software that can enter a lot of source data easily and rapidly. Taking 1000 hours to enter a single census record is obviously not acceptable. And her frustration is in trying to find a program that can record all the needed data, make the data entry task easy, and then produce useful reports making all the data entry time worthwhile.

Maybe the source-driven requirements of a one-place, or a one-name study are different than the needs of a typical genealogist. But I think they are rather similar.

A census record for a genealogist will typically include a single family or maybe several families. These may involve several, or even dozens of people. Although there are not hundreds or thousands of people, like Theresa needs, There still could number hundreds of facts that need to be entered.

Genealogists tend to enter this the wrong way. They find the person, and add the facts to the person. If they’re diligent, they’ll also add the source to each fact, but no software requires them to. Then they no longer have the ability to view the data again by source.

The source data should be entered by source. I expect to make this possible in Behold. Teresa wants several things and this is how I feel I might implement her concerns in Behold:

1. Organize Sources using Keywords/Groups.

   Source titles should be properly named. If this is done, then Behold already sorts the sources and the source details within the source correctly using its smart sort. For an example, see the Steven McCarthy sample file that comes with Behold.

2. Data entry templates for sources.

   We really want good tools to make repetitious data entry easier. Templates are one idea. Text snippets is another. Copy and paste from one source to another should also be possible. These will have to be added in some way into Behold to allow source-based data entry.

3. Associate the source table with the place table.

   Behold already has the event in the place table. But adding the source of each event might be a good idea. I’ve now added that to my Future Plans.

4. Associate a repository to a source (many to many)

   GEDCOM allows multiple Source_Repository_Citations for a single Source_Record, so this capability is already in Behold. Behold’s Repository Details already display the sources obtained from each repository.

5. Associate a repository to a place, so the place report will include the repositories.

   Good idea, but that may not be possible is the data is to be transportable. GEDCOM uses an Address_Structure in its Repository_Record rather than a Place tag. Rarely can you get the place from the address. Some translation table would be required.

The bottom line is that data entry should be source-based and quick and easy. The people could be attached to the sources rather than the other way around.

It must produce output which is useful. Spreadsheets are what Teresa finds most useful now, but if the source information were layed out properly, spreadsheet manipulation might not be necessary.

These are tough goals, but I think they’re mostly achievable within the Behold framework.

Now onward.

I loved our stay in Sydney. It is a teeming megalopolis.City Centre is bustling with people and traffic everywhere. Thousands of stores and businesses and eateries within a few blocks of our hotel. The transportation infrastructure with its trains, subways, buses, taxis, monorail (to be closed this summer, so sad), walkways, bike paths, freeways, tunnels, parkways and ferries is head-spinning. We did all the touristy things, and the highlights included petting a koala at the Featherdale Wildlife Park and watching the surf at Manly beach as it grew from 1 meter waves in the afternoon to 2.5 meter waves in the evening. Despite all the warnings about Sydney being expensive, we didn’t find prices to be outlandish. The rest of the world is catching up and paying $500 K to $1 M for a home is becoming the norm everywhere.

The cruise was of course the center attraction. Mixing genealogy with pleasure was the greatest combination. The 145 people on the genealogy cruise all had the time of our lives, and we became great friends with our tablemates Ken and Lea, Loretta, Kerryn and Lois and our theatre-mates Ken and Barbara.

Now to sort through 2000 emails, 100 RSS feeds, 50 letters (snail mail), call and visit family, 3 weeks of newspapers and organize my 2000 photos and videos and a hundred leaflets from the trip, and I’ll be back rolling again.

I woke up early, and went to the top deck of the ship and did what I call the Voyager of the Seas marathon. I went through all the decks and all the public spaces, both inside and outside, starting with decks 13, 14 and 15 and working my way down to deck 1. It took 95 minutes. I estimated I covered 9 km and even discovered a few nooks and crannies I didn’t know about in all the previous days on the ship.

At 1 pm was Jan Gow on “Delving Deep in FamilySearch: Let’s Forget About the Old – On With the New”

At 2 pm, I was part of a Social Media Panel with Shauna Hicks, Alona Tester, Helen Smith and was moderated by Jill Ball. There were 7 questions. 1. Your favorite social media tool (My blog). 2. How do you use social media to further your business. (My mailing list and forum). 3. Advice to a newbie. (For genealogy social media – try Google+, which got Jill jumping up and down in support of that). 4. What aspect of Social Media makes you grit your teeth (How to use all the venues without repeating yourself). 5. How does it help with your genealogical development (I follow blogs of those who are technical genealogists). 6. How do you fit social media time into your busy day (RSS feeds help save a lot of time). 7. How social media enabled you to connect to a relation or fellow researcher (Social media hasn’t but my Family Research page has).

At 3 pm, I gave my lighthearted presentation on “Why Genealogy is Everyone’s Solemn Duty”.

At 4 pm, Stephen Dando-Collins presented “Captain Bligh’s Other Mutiny and Pasteur’s Gambit”.

We went to our dining room (at 1,600 seats on three floors, it was the largest dining room in Australasia) for the last time.

In the evening we got together back in the Conference room for our Prize Draws and Windup. I gave away two copies of Behold.

Various groups of us got together for pictures. The shot below is of all the geneabloggers.

Thus endeth a wonderfully successful conference, and an amazing cruise.

Post mortem: My presentations will be available for a short time on my SkyDrive at: http://sdrv.ms/XZJKN2 – Note that I did tell some people that www before the sdrv.ms might work, but it looks like it won’t. You have to leave the www off.

Here’s a few quotes from the conference that I had noted:

A lovely cause of death from a document in one of Paul Milner’s presentations: “gradual decay of the powers of life”.

Bob Velke describing the flexibility of his program TMG:  “I give you enough rope to hang yourself.”

Jan Gow on how genealogists do their cleaning. “They sweep the room with a glance,”

Today, I’m writing this from Sydney, the day after we disembarked. What are the odds that our Blue Mountains tour would include a stop at Featherdale Wildlife Park where my wife and I would run into Bob Velke and his wife? That was a Tasmanian devil of a thing to happen.

Paul always talked to a room-full of interested listeners.

At 10 am, we all (145 of us) assembled on the majestic staircase of our ship’s main dining room for a group picture. Below is a picture of the proof, since I don’t have my scanner here with me. Unfortunately, I came from the 4th floor and got caught up at the top of the stairs on the left for the picture, and couldn’t get into a better spot.

After the group picture, they got the organizers and speakers to get together for a picture. We had about 80 people of our groups photographing us for about 5 minutes. You’ll find that picture up on Jill Ball’s Geniaus blog post titled A Canister of Genealogy Speakers,

At 1 pm, I gave my talk about “Using Life Events and Ages to Solve Genealogical Information”.

At 2 pm, Diane Foster, the only other Canadian in our group, presented “Genealogy and Family History, What is the Difference?”

At 4 pm, I gave my 6th presentation: “Warning! Data won’t transfer: GEDCOM Transfers.”

It hasn’t been all genealogy for me. My wife and I have also been enjoying everything the cruise has to offer.

The shows:

The sun:

and the sumptuous delights:

At 11 am, I gained further knowledge about writing an interesting family history with Carol Baxter’s talk on “Writing Narrative Non-Fiction”.

My wife and I shared a nice lunch with Paul Milner and his wife.

After lunch at 1 pm, I presented “Jewish Genealogy: What’s Different and Where to Find It”. I had just a small group of 8 for that, which was a nice intimate group that was extremely interested. Did you know, for example, that 16 of the original 1500 convicts that arrived in Australia were Jewish?

Next was Jill Ball giving an overview and demo of Family Historian.

Before I left the room, Geoff Doherty started presenting “Oh, What a Tangled web…”. But as I gathered up my stuff to leave, I was intrigued by his story of an Australian man who enlisted and then defected from the Boer war in South Africa at the age of 45 who happened to have two wives who found out about each other. I stayed to listen to the end.

Next was my 4th presentation, this one on “GenSoftReviews”. Those in the room were very interested in this. It seems everyone wants a suggestion of what the “best” genealogy program is. I of course told them that GenSoftReviews ratings is a very biased online poll, and does not give comparable ratings. But it will allow you pick out programs that its users like, and allow you to see opinions of the good and the bad about each program, including the one you are using today. I found it interesting that no one in the room was familiar with more than a handful of the multitude of programs available for genealogists.

I again neglected to get a photo of myself presenting. I’ve still got a few chances left to do that.

At dinner, the speakers and the Unlock the Past crew got together.

Remember, I’m only picking out what I’m doing at the Conference. We often have 3 lectures going on at once. The sessions are being very well attended, and the quality of the presentations are up to those you’ll see at any land-based genealogy conference. The difference is you get 8 full days of this, plus a cruise to enjoy at the same time.

I heartily recommend you consider one of the genealogy cruises offered by the several companies that do so. It’s a fantastic way to enjoy your hobby.

I have no talks to give today. My remaining 5 talks will be two tomorrow, two Sunday, and the last one on Monday.

So today I had a chance to listen and learn. As usual, I wasn’t there early enough for the 9 am session. But I caught the tail end of Paul Milner’s 10 am session on “Finding Your Ancestors in Ireland.”

I spent my time at the back of the room, with the other bloggers and organizers as I wrote and posted yesterday’s blog post.

At 11 was Carol Baxter and her session on “Writing an Interesting Family History”. I found this fascinating as I had never heard this topic presented before, nor read about it anywhere. 

Carol has a book, suitably titled “Writing Interesting Family Histories”, which I immediately purchased from her.

In the afternoon, I once again listened to Bob Velke, this time “TMG, Customizing Reports”.

That was it for me this day. I spent the rest of the afternoon exhausting myself around the pools and hot tubs.

Of course, the day is always highlighted by our dinner seating at 6 pm where fellow genealogists Lea and Ken and Kerryn and Lois and Lauretta have become our good dining buddies. (Lauretta got leid twice in Noumea.)

Helen Smith was always busy helping with the conference at the back of the room.

Jill Ball and Anthea Phillips

Natalya Mills, from Clean Cruising, the travel company that arranged our cruise, with her husband Adam.

Alan Phillips

Paul Milner talking on “Buried treasures: what’s in the English parish chest.”

Paul always got a good crowd. He’s a great speaker, very interesting, educational, and amusing.

In the afternoon, I gave my “Why Behold” presentation. I didn’t demonstrate Behold. Instead I gave the history and the concepts behind it, as well as new innovations I expect to introduce, It was well received.

I also had a draw for a free copy of Behold.Alona Tester was the winner.

Rosemary Kopittke talked about Findmypast Australia.

Helen Smith talked about One Name Studies. I wasn’t going to stay for this one, but it was so interesting, I couldn’t leave.

Jan Gow was talking about “The world with Ancestry: Let’s Search the World in Our Pyjamas!”.But we often had three talks at once, and I had to miss hers

… to catch the end of Bob Velke’s “The Master Genealogist: source citations and sentences.”

The next day, we arrived in Noumea, New Calendonia. We only had a minimum number of programs on our shore leave days.

As it turns out, our ship had an electrical problem. We couldn’t leave Noumea that day. So we stayed an extra day. Because of the delay, our journey on to Lautoka, Fiji had to be cancelled. Everyone was sad about that. With the electric failure of the Carnival ship in the Caribbean now happening, it is obvious we didn’t want to take any extra chances.

As a result, we switched our minimal Friday Day 5 program (which would have been the Fiji shore leave) with our Thursday Day 4 program.

So tomorrow, we’ll start 4 full days of sessions.

My endeavor to get yesterday’s blog post up successfully concluded at about 2 o’clock in the morning. Figuring out the wifi on the ship and getting the pics transferred from my phone to the laptop and even finding a place on the boat with wifi and a standard plug were problematic, but from here on in it should be easier.

As a result of the late evening, I didn’t get to the conference until the 11 am sessions. There were three going on. Carol Baxter was presenting “Tracing your Ancestors in New South Wales” in room 1:

Shauna Hicks was presenting “Victorian Resources for Family History Research” in room 2:

and Neil Bradley was presenting “Tracing your Ancestors in Western Australia” in room 3:

Unfortunately, all my ancestors are from Romania and Ukraine, so these didn’t help me much personally. But the crowd is mostly Australian and was very interested.

In the afternoon, at the 1 pm session, I listened to Jan Gow on using Legacy, titled “Getting to Know Legacy: Just a Storehouse? No Way!!!”.

She had a wonderful presentation that very clearly emphasized the importance of sourcing and the need to make it as simple as possible or you won’t do it.

Next at 2 pm was my presentation on “Genealogy Software – Choosing and Using”.  I didn’t manage to take any pictures of myself presenting, but if I find one on another site, I’ll add a link to it here.

Following my presentation at 3 pm was Bob Velke with his first talk about The Master Genealogist. Bob had sat through my presentation way at the back left of the room, and hopefully enjoyed and agreed with what I had to say. I’ve always thought TMG is one of the most comprehensive genealogy programs available. And Bob had been a very had worker to help try to advance GEDCOM and make data transfer better with his GenBridge process. I had a brief talk with Bob after his session and hope to meet with him for more later on.

At one of the 4 pm sessions, Jill Ball did GeneaGoogling:

… and, of course, outside of the conference we’re also enjoying everything else the ship has to offer.

Prior to supper, we met up with Helen Smith (a genea-blogger) and Alona Tester (also a blogger, and an Unlock the Past employee who is not so secretly the daughter of Alan Phillips). It’s easy to identify each other by the green Clean Cruising lanyard we wear around our necks, which is a different color than all the other passengers have.

‘

Our Unlock the Past genealogy conference group has its own set of tables assigned for the 6 pm session. Our table includes my wife Cheryl, Ken and Lea Harris of Newcastle, Kerryn Dixon-Ward and her mother Lois of Melbourne, and Lauretta Nobes. Cheryl, Ken and Lois are the non-genealogists at our table who came along for the ride.

At 9 o’clock, we had a greet and meet in our Conference Centre. Most of the group attended. One out of every 20 people on the ship are here for genealogy (or tagging along with someone who is), so the green lanyard is not that uncommon.

Our host Alan Phillips greeted the attendees. Helen Smith and Jill Ball said a few words.

It was nice to meet up with Jan Gow again, who I hadn’t talked to since Roots Tech a year ago in Salt Lake City.

And then the Genea-bloggers who were there got together for a picture. There was Sharon (Fritz) Walker, Alona Tester, Lee-Ann Hamilton, Helen Smith, me, Linda Elliot, Paul Milner and Jill Ball. The one blogger we know is here but is missing from the picture is Shauna Hicks.

So that’s really Day 1 of the cruise, but I’m calling it Day 0 of the Conference, since the Conference program officially begins tomorrow.

Last night, we took the train out to Hornsby, a 45 minute ride Northwest of Sydney. There, Alan Phillips of Gould Genealogy / Unlock the Past were putting on an all-day session for the Hornsby folk.

We had a nice supper there as I joined Jill Ball (on the right, who I previously met at RootsTech last year) and her husband Robert, and Paul Milner (in the white shirt with the tie) and his wife Carol, who we’ll see more of on the cruise over the next 9 days. Also at the table with us were others from the Hornsby genealogy organization who attended the day’s sessions but (so sad for them) will not be joining us on the cruise.

I also briefly met Bob Velke of Wholly Genes (TMG) who didn’t stay for supper, but who will be on the cruise.

Earlier in the day, my wife Cheryl and I were exploring The Rocks. To our delight, our ship had already docked and we got a great look at what we are about to embark on in a few hours.

Voyager of the Seas was the largest ship in the world when it was constructed in 1999 and is the largest ship every to dock in Australia.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to blog a little about the Conference during the cruise if internet connections permit.

Now off to the ship!

If there are any Behold users that can make it to downtown Sydney while we’re there, I’d love to get together with you. Maybe we can go to a restaurant for lunch or supper. Send me an email or leave me a message at our hotel and I’ll try to get back to you.

We’re looking forward to the change in climate. It’s been –20 to –30 C here in Winnipeg over the last week. We’ve been as cold or colder than the South Pole on nine different days this winter.

It doesn’t snow much here, but it doesn’t melt all winter. We’ve got 30 cm of snow on the ground and snowpiles 1 to 3 meters high at the sides of the roads.

At –30 C., It’s so cold, the warm exhaust air from buildings condenses into clouds.

Today was groundhog day. The groundhog in Winnipeg doesn’t get a chance to see if he has a shadow or not. As soon as he comes out of his hole, he freezes solid.

The final count is 145 people booked for the genealogy program. But it will still feel like a RootsTech type of event with 3,800 people on the ship.

Our group will have full use of the conference center on the ship. This is one of the few ships afloat with its own conference center. There is one large room that can be configured in different ways. Our configuration will be for three rooms that can hold 120, 60 and 40 people. Generally, we’ll have 3 concurrent sessions going on.

There’s close to 100 presentations by at least 15 different speakers, several of whom I met last year at RootsTech 2012 and I look forward to meeting again.

The group will first meet for supper where we’ll have a set block of tables in the dining room, which will be followed by a meet and greet. The last night, there will be prize draws and a genealogy wind up session.

I am going to try to do some blogging, before, during and after the cruise. I can’t promise too much for the “during” part, because the internet is said to be slow and we shouldn’t rely on it.

For the past 4 years, at the end of the year, I have listed all programs with at least 10 reviews (at least 1 that year) with a rating of 4.00 or more out of 5, and awarded them a “Users Choice Award”. For 2012, there were 19 programs earning the award.

Since then, I’ve seen many accusations, got emails, and even had “reviews” on GenSoftReviews stating that the awards are not fair. One person wondered about “a flurry of positive reviews”. Another said: “I cannot take the awards seriously. The numbers are clearly being gamed.” Someone even tabulated all the 5-star reviews in a row for one program and tried to prove that it couldn’t be different real people who are doing the ratings.

So I’ve had to think about what all this means. People don’t believe the ratings on GenSoftReviews either when a program they are using is not rated highly enough, or when another program they do not feel is superior to their own is rated higher than their own.

C’mon. Get a life, people. Realize that any user rating site is biased by definition. The same can be said for other sites that give user ratings for other products. Examples: TripAdvisor, electronics reviews online, or mobile app store ratings. It is only the people who find out about the site and take the time to go there, and decide that they have a reason to vote who do so. Their reason to vote may be that they have a product they really like or they tried a product but really didn’t like it. In statistical terms, all ratings sites of this format are a non-random sample.

So, no. The ratings really are not perfectly comparable between programs. But that does not mean they are not useful.

I would say that a program rated 4.4 out of 5 is not “better” than one rated 3.9 out of 5. What I would say is that the people who came to the site gave program A “a higher rating” than program B.

Ratings are subjective. But for most people, to give a 4 out of 5, then you must really like that program. To give a 5 out of 5, then you must love it and be a real fan of it. Once you get to 3 or less, then people have some qualms with the program. That is where the reviews will help you. You’ll see some of the issues that people have with the program.

So I’ve decided that the magic 4.00 out of 5 is the goal that all genealogy software developers should try to attain. Then they’ll be awarded a “Users Choice Award”. I hope the award becomes something that the genealogy community sees as a good thing to attain. And I hope vendors who earn it will want to display it on their website and literature, as it will indicate that users of the program really like their program – and the reviews are there to prove it.

Now what about the situation where a vendor tells its user base about GenSoftReviews and asks them all to rate and review the program. I think that’s great if they do that. They are confident enough in the quality of their program and the happiness of their users that they are not worried about getting bad reviews. If the reviews come in positive and they are rated above 4, they’ll get positive reinforcement that they’re doing a good job. But if they get a lot of poor reviews, then they’ll get important customer feedback that will help them improve their program in areas they may not have realized they needed to. Hopefully, the result of that will be that the program is improved and the next year the ratings for the program goes up. Hey – Isn’t that what you’d call a win-win situation?

Besides. Isn’t the most important thing about a program how much the users like it? This takes into account everything. Not just the features of the program, but how easy it is use, the support, the feeling of community, the marketing of the company, and other intangibles that are impossible to agree on.

If I had my druthers, I’d get 100 users from every one of the 702 programs to rate and review their program. If they got a rating over 4.00, then I’d say they’ve done a good job with their program and should continue their great work.

I think GenSoftReviews does the best job possible in providing you with other user’s opinions about programs. These are real people willing to stick their neck out and say they like or don’t like a program. I don’t know how you can get ratings that are fairer than that.

So is there anything wrong with my thinking here?

+1 Behold just received an Honourable Mention in the Best New Genealogy Product category of Tamura Jones’ GeneAwards 2012.

+1 Just compiled the 19 programs receiving the GenSoftReviews Top Rated Genealogy Software awards for 2012.

-1 My Dad’s 88 and not doing so well in the nursing home. I see him 4 times a week, and we make each other feel better.

+1 Looking forward to the February Unlock The Past Genealogy Cruise and get away my wife and I will enjoy in Sydney Australia in February.

-1 Missing RootsTech 2013 this year, but hope to watch the streaming Keynotes.

+1,-1 Helped get the Genealogy and Family History Q&A site going, but more people need to find out about it.

+1 I love my Nokia Lumia 920.

+99 Behold is going to make really good progress this year! Almost everything this year will be new conceptual stuff, not seen in genealogy software before: Life events; family at events; in-report consistency checks, 64-bit, perfect GEDCOM 5.5.1 output. Them’s the goals.

It started off great, with Version 1.04 released in January after a flurry of activity that followed the 1.0 release just a couple of months earlier. For the next few months, I was merrily on my way with a number of small improvements and bug fixes and I was preparing to finish off Version 1.05 to get ready to add GEDCOM export and a Behold database file format that would be the next step before editing.

Then in April, I was taken in by the concept of Life Events. I realized that using this idea and creating a personalized timeline for every individual is the best way to display genealogical data so that it is most useful. It eliminates the improper family definition of family (parents and children) that most genealogy software implements. It also provides a framework upon which consistency checking can be added. That April post on Life Events even included a simple example that I had quickly programmed into Behold.

At the time, it didn’t seem like it would take too long to finish off Life Events. I continued to work on it over the summer, and it grew in complexity. But I couldn’t get it to completion.

On August 15th, I took to Reassessing the Behold Road Map and I put my plans in order.

On August 24th, I got sidetracked. I became involved in helping to get a Genealogy Q&A Site going. It’s not that this isn’t a valuable thing for the Genealogy community. Yes it is. It’s just that it deflected too much of my time. When I get involved in something, I get involved! And that’s bad when that something also has the attributes of being fun and addictive, and takes me too much away from Behold.

I didn’t have a lot of free time during the fall, and Behold’s Life Events included a fair bit of complicated code that needed to be worked out properly. It was all too easy to pass on this hard stuff and play around with the Genealogy Q&A site. Add to this some time taken for learning and playing with my Windows Phone, preparation and planning for my Genealogy Cruise in February, plus my regular routine complicated by a more than average set of out-of-the-ordinary happenings – all have been helping to take me off course.

So, as I said, I’m not happy with my progress. Behold should have Life Events and Consistency Checking in it by now. It doesn’t and there’s still work left to get it there.

Let’s see if I can get it rolling again. You’ll be able to tell by this blog. The more I work on Behold, the more I blog about it.

The article reviews these programs: The Master Genealogist, RootsMagic, Heredis, Family Tree Builder, and Family Tree Maker for Mac, and Behold.

Bandy says: “Standing out in a crowded field of ‘me-too’ software, Behold is a new approach to viewing and using your family genealogy. Having had a chance to use the program with my own research, I have to say it’s worth investigating!”

He then describes what Behold does, some of the extras it includes, and of course, its limitation in that it currently does not edit your data. He does, however, then refer to Behold’s Future Plans page and highlights some of what’s coming.

He ends up saying: “For more information and reviews on the program, try the following sites:” and refers to Tamura Jones’ review of Behold 1.0 and to Dick Eastman’s post of my Behold 1.0 news release.

Bandy also lists two sites to help you find genealogy software reviews. The first site he lists is GenSoftReviews.

The publisher may have stretched it a bit in the subtitle on the cover to imply that Behold is a “popular” program along the lines of the other five programs. However, it is my goal to get it there.

Consistency checking was one of the important things missing from Behold. I felt it was very necessary to have it prior to going further. Today’s article by Tamura Jones: Consistency Check Reminder, solidifies my belief, and states:

“If your so-called genealogy editor does not offer consistency and reasonability checks, you should upgrade to something better.”

But then this struck me:

“The approach most vendors take today is merely providing the checks through some menu item, and hoping the user has already taken advantage of this feature when they generate a report. That’s understandable, but many users never take advantage of that menu item, because it takes time and isn’t very enjoyable, and because no one reminds them that they should.”

That is true, and the suggestion is made that programs prompt you every so often to do the consistency check. But I don’t think that carries it far enough. Instead, I suggest that the consistency checking not be an option, but always be done and be shown alongside the data so the user can fix it right then and there.

Here’s an example of what Behold’s consistency checking will look like:

The consistency problems are highlighted in red. Why did the husband die before the wife was born? Why was she married between the ages of 1 and 2? Why was no death date given or estimated?

Of course, Behold will have the advantage that the “report” will also be (when editing is added in Version 2) the input mechanism for entering and updating the data. So you’ll be able to correct the inconsistencies right there in the report. Correct the marriage year from 1513 to 1533, and the consistency problem will vanish and so will the message in red.

I suspect the reason why Tamura does not suggest that the checking always be done is the time it might take:

“Although it would be nice to ensure that data is consistent before creating a report, consistency checks do take time, and may take considerable time for large databases. Trying the user’s patience by making them wait on a complete database check every time they want to generate a small report would not provide an enjoyable user experience.”

Well, my argument here is if it’s done right, it shouldn’t add more than a small fraction of time to the processing. If the overhead is small, then the consistency checking can be done while the reports are being displayed. The check need only be done completely once the first time the report is being generated and can thereafter be reused for other reports. When an edit is made, the closely related people are the only ones that need to be rechecked.

With Behold’s life events and integrated consistency checking, the next release should result in Behold becoming one of the very best data checking genealogy programs, for both GEDCOM validation and for consistency checking.

—

I’m happy to announce: Today marks 10 years exactly since the first Behold blog post. This is my 815th blog post over that time.

—

November 8 note: Tamura has added another article: Integrated Consistency Checking, which suggests remembering results and using background checking in order to always provide results. Those are good ideas.

Well, let’s see how Behold is doing.

The software would have two separate, but interconnected, modes: Evidence and Conclusion. Switching between the modes for data entry would have to be seamless, and there would have to be the ability to view both modes simultaneously.

Sounds good so far. 

The Evidence mode would have the following features:

This mode would focus on individual records. A full citation would be entered, free-form, prior to any other information. Citation templates are not used, but example citations for various record types can be referenced. (In an ideal world, there would be a “citation help” menu linking directly to an embedded or online version of Evidence Explained.)

I personally hate forms. Slow. Inefficient. Free form is the way to go. This is planned when I add editing. I like Michael’s idea of example citations and citation help. Very implementable and likely what I’ll do.

Digital images of records can be imported. Names in the records can be directly linked to individuals in the Conclusion mode. (This technology can already be used in The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding.)

The digital images of records should be with the source list. The way Behold does sources is by displaying the people, events and places that the source provides evidence for. These are linked to the people and places. This is already implemented.

Use of split-screen for transcription of record, similar to Transcribe. The transcription would be linked directly to the image or the citation of the record.

Interesting. A bit of a frill. You can easily view the record in an image browser while transcribing it into any genealogy program.

Again, I think the image of the record should be kept with the source. And the transcription is the data for the source. So they’re already together.

Extraction templates, such as those used by Clooz, could be utilized, and linked directly to images or citations of records. Free-form word processor could also be used for extraction. Each extract also has fields for recording the Informant (which would be linked to the individual in Conclusion mode) and their knowledge of the event (primary or secondary).

To heck with that. Just free form it all. Formality leads to inefficiency.

Creation” field for each record would allow for the recording of citations to and/or transcriptions of relevant laws.

I have no idea what this means, but when editing is implemented, Behold will allow you to create any custom fields you want … although I wouldn’t recommend you get carried away with this. Other programs will not be able to read your custom fields.

Related records could be directly linked to each other. For example, a military pension record could be linked to the compiled service record and the draft registration record.

I don’t see the purpose of this. If a person is connected to all three records, then you’ll have the connections needed from the person’s events. Why would you want to cross-link records? It’s not necessary.

Better is to enable Sources of Sources like I plan to do. When you have a derived source, you can link to the source it was derived from. Then one day, you can go to the original source and check it out for yourself.

A land record tools would provide ability to plat land based on federal or “metes and bounds” land descriptions. (Such as what is done in Deedmapper and other surveying software.) Neighboring lands can be linked together through their shared borders. Lands would have independent timelines through which ownership history could be entered, with independent citations. Both Google maps and historic/USGS topographic maps can be imported. Federal land descriptions may have built-in geocodes, allowing plats to appear in correct location on Google maps. All lands can be manually placed on any imported maps. Geographic features could be linked to USGS Geographic Names Information System for assistance in locating land.

How about if we supply KML (Google maps file) support. That’s what’s really required. The above system seems better in an independent program like Deedmapper.

All records or analysis entries can be “tagged” with relevant events and individuals, but would not be exclusive to single events or individuals.

Already implemented. The sources show all people, events and places. The analysis entries are normally placed with the event. They are event specific. If you have analysis about the source, then it is with the source.

What other features would be useful in the Evidence mode?

Well, repositories should link to sources. Sources should be subdivided by source detail. They should automatically be smart-sorted by source title.

And this should all work with Source Based Data Entry.

The Conclusion mode would have the following features:

This mode would focus on individual people, using a “life timeline.”

Hmmm. Just what I’m finishing up now for Version 1.1

Individuals would have a “profile,” in addition to the timeline, allowing the recording of status tags: gender, race, occupation, free/slave status, etc. Changes in status would also appear in the timeline.

I sort of disagree here. Changes in status are events. You should record them as such. All events will appear in the timeline.

Events or facts would be entered into an individual’s timeline. The events/facts entry would allow creation and use of common verbs in addition to the “genealogical” actions commonly contained in software.

IOW flexible data entry with custom tags if necessary. Yup. Coming with editing.

Only a single instance of each vital event can be entered. Rather than cluttering the timeline with multiple entries based on conflicting evidence (which would be able to be recorded in the Evidence mode), the individual timeline would contain only the conclusions.

That should be up to the user. If you have multiple pieces of evidence supporting multiple birthdates and only want one shown, then add the others as notes to the one. If not keep them separate. But don’t forced this one way or the other onto anyone.

Events would be able to be recorded as specific (or approximate) dates, or ranges of dates.

Powerful and smart handling of dates. Yes!  Age calculations. Yes!  With ranges. Yes! With approximate dates. Yes! Maybe the program could even estimate dates for you – planned!

What about comprehensive logic checking of dates? Put it right into the “timeline” and show the problems so they can immediately be fixed right there, where you see the error. I’m adding the logic checking for Version 1.1, and the in-place editing is coming when editing is implemented.

Events or facts would cite either individual records or proof arguments. Citations link directly to records contained in the Evidence mode. Proof arguments would be composed with a full-featured word processor (not some plain-text “Notes” field) that would allow formatting, table-creation, and internal reference notes (which could also be linked directly to records in Evidence mode).

That’s what I’m doing. Right in what will be a full-featured word processor designed for genealogy.

Except, the formatting and table-creation is something you probably don’t want. Notes should be simple and not made to look too fancy. It just won’t look good in a report and will cause problems. If you want something more complication, link to an object (a spreadsheet, a word-processing document, etc) with a small note about what is in the object
.

One would have the ability to view timelines for separate individuals side-by-side.

I think he’s thinking of this as a graphical timeline. Graphics and charts are really more difficult for visualization than you thing. They’re really more for show and display.

What’s really wanted is to include the “life events” of family members in an individual’s timeline. Then you get everything in context – again with ages, which illustrate illogicalities in an obvious way.

Timeline events could be linked between multiple individuals. For example, a land transaction would appear as a linked event in both the grantor’s and grantee’s timelines.

Those are two participants in an event. GEDCOM used to have a Witness tag to handle this. They changed that and in 5.5 it is now a Relationship. None-the-less, that is already coded into Behold. There’s just too few GEDCOM datasets that include it.

In addition to Individual Timeline, Family Group Sheet, and Pedigree Chart Views, one could also access information through Kinship Network and Associate Network Views. These two “network” views would have a graphic interface similar to that used by GenoPro. They would allow connections to be made directly between people regardless of biological relationship.

More relationship tags.

Associate Network View would automatically import connections based on shared events. Manual connections could also be made. Descriptions would be entered for different kinds of connections. Connections would be cited and linked to records in Evidence mode. Association connections can be tied to timelines, to represent the development or destruction of specific connections. Connections could also be weighted by strength (for differentiation between “strong ties” and “weak ties”).

Huh?

What other features could be useful in the Conclusion mode?

C’mon. Lots of important things you’re missing. Immediate logic checking. WYSIWYG display. In-place on-report editing. Formless. Modeless. Ribbonlike simplicity for data type selection. Extensive integrated help. Fast navigation with hyperlinks. Undo/Redo. Unicode everywhere and anywhere.

You’ve put together a good list, Michael. Behold will probably meet many of your goals, but I expect in a very different way than you’d imagine.

But the Genealogy community showed its mettle and showed how much they want this Q&A site.

First there there was the Definition phase where 40 sample questions were needed that would define the type of questions this site would support. Each question had to have 10 up-votes, but every participant only had 5 votes each. It took 20 days for 150 participants to define 98 example questions and give 10 votes to 40 of them.

Then there was the Commitment Phase which was a bit more challenging. We needed 200 people to “commit” to participating in the Beta with a promise to supply at least 10 questions and/or answers during the Beta. In addition, there had to be 100 people with at least 200 reputation points on the Stack Exchange network of Question and Answer sites. Getting the latter was more difficult. The Stack Exchange network started from the Stack Overflow site, which is a Q&A site for programmers that I frequently go to for help with problems I encounter in the programming of Behold. This requirement was there to ensure there would be enough people who understood how Stack Exchange sites were supposed to work, and they would help guide the Beta stage. Unfortunately, the crossover of genealogy enthusiasts and programmers and those types who were on Stack Exchange sites was quite a rare thing. None-the-less, in 31 days, we were able to attract enough committers.

Then the Private Beta began. This was a 7 day period, where the Committers were expected to seed the site with good questions and answers and set the site in motion so that it would be ready for the general public. During that time, about 200 people asked 100 questions provided 300 answers and had amazing time experiencing the Genealogy and Family History Q&A site in action.

We’ve found it exhilarating, addicting and exhausting.

Now the site is in Public Beta, and it is open to everyone. The goal for the Beta is to build up participation and let the site reach the critical mass it will need to be a success. That requires certain traffic goals: 15 questions a day, 5,000 visits a day, enough users, as well as a growing traffic pattern. After a minimum of 90 days in Beta, if the site achieves these goals, the Stack Exchange people will promote it to permanent status and hand it over to the participants for them to run.

Personally, I think this is a great thing for genealogists worldwide. If it works even half as good as Stack Overflow does for programmers, we’ll end up with a site we can go to and get expert answers from our questions within hours, if not minutes. I can see millions of genealogists worldwide participating in this together.

Google indexes the questions and answers on the site very quickly. Take a look at this question I asked yesterday. It is already indexed and is first in Google search today:  What is the town in this census listing?

Because of the rapid indexing and high rank the search engines give to Stack Exchange Sites, once there are numerous genealogy questions on the site, the site will start growing on its own. People will find it from searching for answers.

I encourage all genealogists and family historians of all levels to try it out. Be sure you ask quality questions for problems that you have that an expert can answer for you, and if you can answer other people’s questions, please do so.

Go to: http://genealogy.stackexchange.com/ and sign up.

I’ll see you there.

Here’s some of the reasons the 256 committers to date have said they’re excited about the site:

Avid Enthusiasts and Prosumers (whatever that is) have said:

“Great potential for resource.”

“I’d like to see a global, multi-stakeholder community develop to support Genealogy & Family History. ”

“To have one location for Q&As.”

“Most genealogy Q&A sites are very local and non-technical. It’ll be interesting to see if this one can have more global and technical coverage.”

“Have lurked a bit on Stack Overflow and discovered the benefits of this type of forum. Look forward to participating in Stack Exchange’s Genealogy!”

“We need a site like this!”

“This will be very useful for the community.”

“Sites independent of the major for-profit providers are rare. I would be happy to support this one.”

“Awesome idea, which will be extremely popular worldwide.”

“I want to share my knowledge with other people and have access to the fields of expertise of other genealogists.”

“I believe in contributing to things in which I believe.”

“Great Idea, Have lots of questions and only to happy to assist others if I can.”

“I like the idea of an independent site that is not commercially driven.”

“We need this.”

Beginners and Learners have said:

“Cannot find answers”

“Just beginning. Need all the help I can get.”

“Online genealogists are so generous and helpful with their research and and answering others’ questions. I hope to learn and help others learn.”

“I would find it a great value to be able to ask general genealogy questions while I seek to expand on my documented family tree.”

“I am learning all the time and welcome a site where I can pose some of my own questions and receive help from those who know more than I do.”

“This is the place I can’t find find elsewhere on the web. I want it to go live for myself and others to have that one-stop-shopping place we need.”

Academics and Research-Level Students have said:

“Looking to be a resource for beginners, as well as finding resources from the experts.”

“I am supporting this site to assist readers in finding resources related to historical and family history resources.”

“A site to ask serious genealogy questions could be very useful. ”

“This is a great idea that needs a beginning. Once the ball is rolling with active participants I believe it will take off.”

“There are those who have questions and there are those who have the answers. We need to thing them together.”

Professionals or Experts have said:

“My goal is to help educate genealogists with research methodologies.”

“I am involved in several genealogy projects professionally and I think this site could be a huge help.”

“Feel this will be a valuable contribution to all levels of family historians.”

“I’m a retired professional, formerly board-certified genealogist, interested in sharing what I’ve learned the last 40 years of my research.”

“I like the idea of being able to ask and answer questions about genealogy. I will answer questions and ask questions I think will benefit everyone.”

In Summary:

“Genealogy + Stack Exchange = Great idea!”

If you’d like to participate (like me), I encourage you to go and sign up at
the Genealogy & Family History Q&A Proposal Site.

Click on the word “Commit” in the green box on the left, and then fill in the Commitment form:

You will get an email confirming your application and you’ll have to click a link in the email to verify your email address before you will be included.

Then tell everyone you know who might want to participate in a free Q&A site that is independent of all genealogy vendors and organizations.

When the site gets enough committers (a few hundred), you will be sent an email to let you know that the trial (Beta) Q&A has been set up and you can start asking and/or answering questions.

You’ll be getting in on the ground floor of something that, in a few years, I can see millions of genealogists participating in.

I’ve done this for several years on StackOverflow, the site for programmers that is on the same network – and I’ll tell you it’s been fantastic. I’m drooling at the idea of having the same thing for genealogy.

So once again, go to the Genealogy Q&A Proposal, commit yourself to use the site, and tell others to do the same.

—-

Bloggers, et al. Feel free to copy and use any or all of this post, and do please spread the word!

Before you read the rest of this post, if you feel you’d like to have such a site, then go right over to the Genealogy proposal at Area51 and sign up.

Area51 is where topics are proposed for Q&A sites on the StackExchange network. Currently they have 88 topics with 2.2 million users who asked 4.3 million questions and had 8.6 million answers for those questions.

I got involved about 4 years ago with the first site created: StackOverflow, which is a site for programming questions. Personally, I’ve asked 127 questions and got good answers to all of them. This has been tremendously useful in my work to program Behold. Often, when a Google search wouldn’t find the answer to my problem, I’d post on StackOverflow and I’d get answers within minutes. Often, my problem would be solved within an hour. I’ve also helped others and have given answers to 202 questions by other people.

How many programmers are there in the world? Take a look at the question and some of the answers given at StackOverflow. Then look at the comments people make on both the question and the answers and how those add so much value and clarification. If you like a question, you upvote it. If you like an answer you upvote it. The best answers float to the top. The asker gets to choose which answer they want to accept and it gets a green checkmark. You gain “reputation” and “badges” for what you do, especially when people upvote what you do.

It’s practically a social site. And it’s also a friendly competition for reputation, where you learn to respect the answers of those who have more Rep than you.  It is a lot of fun and somewhat addictive. But most of all, it is educational, interesting and provides you with fast answers to information you need.

The accepted answer to the programmers question was that there are about 12 million in the world. At StackOverflow, there are over 1 million registered users. That means 1 out of every 12 programmers in the world is at StackOverflow.

I think there are way more genealogists in the world than that. I think genealogists need answers to their questions just as much as programmers do. It’s now our turn to take advantage of the offerings of the StackExchange people and get our very own Q&A site for genealogy. The only requirements are that we prove our mettle. We’ll need to show that we can get at least a couple of hundred people to sign up, and then run the site in Beta and show that we can keep up a required level of interest. Should that be achieved, the Genealogy site will be added permanently to the StackExchange network, and we will have done something really great for the genealogy community. All of us will benefit.

This would be a Q&A site for genealogy, run independently of the interests of any genealogy company. It would be completely free for anybody to use.

If you have a genealogy newsletter or are a Geneablogger and are reading this post, please tell your readers and let’s kick-start this thing. We need at least 200 people to sign up to get to Beta mode. Let’s all work together and do this.

Disclaimer: I have no vested interest in this Q&A site whatsoever. I am  recommending it because I truly believe having it would be a great thing for genealogists everywhere.

I’ve been manually deleting the messages one by one, and manually deleting the users who’ve been sending them. But I’m finally fed up, and decided I needed to do something.

First, it’s not just a simple bot posting the messages there. My forum requires you be logged in to post. That means you have to register. To do that, you have to enter a valid email address, get the email, and then click on the link in the email to activate. Over the last month, I’ve been getting new users named: iszfozbov, xsaaozboi, sdbns82001, etc. Most have hotmail addresses. All seem to have different IP addresses. But I know whatever does the register must be automated, because they fill in “Location”, “Occupation” and “Interests” fields that aren’t even in the signup form. Funny that most of the locations entered are: “ShenZhen”. So it must be some bot that is looking for some submit button on a form that says “Register” and posts all sorts of values for variables: Name, FirstName, LastName, Email, maybe hundreds of combinations, to every website it finds until one sends an email back. They may manually or automatically “press” the link in the email and they’re in. Then it can start automatically posting spam with its now validated registration, and so it does. Once they’re in, it now knows it’s a site it can start to use more and more – hoping that they can keep their spams unnoticed by the administrator for long enough that some idiot comes by and clicks on the links in them, or maybe Googlebot will come by and notice that a reputable site has links to them, so as to add to their reputation (Google PageRank) thus enabling them to move them up in the search result. I really don’t know all the reasons why they do it, but they do.

I’ve already eliminated most of the spam from comments on the Behold blog and user reviews on GenSoftReviews. Both are WordPress blog sites, and several WordPress techniques (I don’t want to divulge here in case the spammers are reading) have worked to make those fairly clean. Unfortunately at GenSoftReviews, since that site does not require a user to login, I also had to hold reviews containing a website address in it for moderation before it gets posted. Almost all spam contains an address – otherwise what is the use?

At the Behold forum, it’s a different situation. I have an older version of bbPress implemented that I heavily customized and integrated with my WordPress site and overall site design. That was a lot of work, and I’m not planning on redoing that any time soon, so upgrading to a newer version of bbPress is not currently a feasible option.

But I found a few old bbPress plugins to help me. One will allow me, like at GenSoftReviews, to hold the posts with website addresses in them for moderation. It’ll also email me to let me know, so that I can quickly approve the valid posts. A couple of other plugins allow me to mass edit posts and mass edit users, which makes cleanup much easier. In fact, it took me only about 20 seconds to clean up the forum after I implemented these.

Hopefully these measures will alleviate the flood of spam – or at least hide it from any visitors to the Behold forum.

So much to do. So much gets in the way of doing it.

Now guess what was on my mind after that. Yup. I wanted to try it. It sounded right and didn’t sound too hard. In only four hours, I was able to set it up so that it worked for most of the Behold website. (Just a few wide images, the forum, and the User Guide have a bit of design work left).

Overall, I love the effect. This website is now fluid. It will size itself appropriately depending on the device you are on. All content will appear with full features on all devices. I’ll only need to maintain this one website. It really is the best solution.

Try it out. You’re now looking at this blog page. This is what it looks like if you are on a Desktop or device that has a physical screen width of 800 pixels or more:

Now grab the right side of the browser window and pull it to the left to make the window narrower. You’ll see how the right hand column seems to vanish (it actually moves to the bottom) and the rest of the content gets squeezed to fit the space.

Now make it even narrower. This is about the width of an iPhone:

And this is how it might look in the iPhone (courtesy of iphonetester.com):

So now the job’s effectively done, and I’m set for the future. And the future’s not too far away. I was checking my Google analytics data, and during the past month, a full 5% of the people who came to my Behold site did it from a smartphone (excluding my own accesses, of course). In the next few years, as smartphones become standard issue, that percentage will continue to go up.

Behold’s site can now be classified as Mobile friendly! As with everything, it’s not perfect yet. But over time I’ll find and clean up the glitches.

p.s. Check out your other favorite genealogy sites with your handheld. How good do they look? Are they usable?

This blog post is dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter.

I carefully chose a fixed size width of 782 pixels that printed well on paper and nicely fit onto most screen resolutions right down to 800 by 600 which was used on the smallest screens. All text was easily visible on those, even if you had a laptop with a small 13 inch diagonal screen.

A few weeks ago, my webhost Netfirms sent me an ad that offered the goMobi service to “Make Your Website Look Great on Mobile Devices”. I was curious, and went to the goMobi website. But they had no demos, and no examples of how it would be done. I would have to sign up first. There was nothing there to impress me that it would do a good job of my site. In fact, it seemed like it was separate and I’d have to maintain two sites: my full site, and my mobile site.

So I searched for a better way, and it didn’t take me to long before I found out about Google’s GoMo Mobilize your site promotion. They offer to give you a mobile version of your website made for free, with 1 year of hosting of it free, and after that it would be $9 a month. That service is offered by Duda Mobile which has very impressive features, especially when compared to goMobi. The number one feature they have which no other service I found has is that it syncs with your website. Any changes you make to your website are automatically updated in the mobile site. This is what the Duda Mobile version of my site looks like:

Overall, it’s a pretty darn good job. They let you customize the formatting, change some of the ways the site navigation works and even do a good job with my WordPress blog.

It’s not perfect, however. Tables are not loaded in at all, so the Behold forum is a mess. Hover is not loaded so my popup testimonials are missing. The login areas need to be changed, and I’m not sure I’m happy with the site navigation. Still, it’s quite impressive. And I do have to say that their customer support is excellent. I would have no trouble recommending them to someone who has a straightforward site to convert. I may have just too many customized things in my site that they don’t handle.

1. So Duda Mobile is one way of converting a web site to a mobile version. What are some other ways?

2. The second method is to create a separate customized site for mobiles that has a selection of the content from the full web site. I don’t personally like this. It bugs me when I go to mobile sites that do not have the full info. Okay, they might have a link to the full site, but why not just format the full data nicer. And you’ll have two sites to maintain instead of one. See also: Why We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites.

3. A third way is to try to modify the formatting depending on the capabilities of the device and the size of its screen. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can then  use conditional statements to specify the format like this:

@media screen and (max-width: 480px) {
   background-color: red;
   font-size: 1.5em;
}

This method only requires one website and it works both ways. But sometimes it may guess wrong. For more on this method, see: Mobile-friendly: The mobile web optimization guide: Strategy #3: Build mobile-aware adaptive sites.

4. Give the user control. On the .mobi site, use one CSS file specific for the mobi formatting. On the full site, use the original CSS file for the site. At the top of the page, allow the user to choose the other site if they want to. See for example, The 5-Minute CSS Mobile Makeover.

5. Method 5 is a bit trickier. I’ve got a PHP site. PHP is a server-side language that runs code and you only see the final result. PHP can detect the domain name with its $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] query and do certain things if it knows it’s on the .mobi site and do different things if it’s on the full site. This is much more powerful method than CSS which just changes formatting, since it can change content as well.

6. Method 6 is simply to modify the whole website so that it looks good on small mobile screens, and use that one look for everything. Might look a bit skimpy on the big ones then.

There is a problem with two domain names pointing to one set of content (methods 4 and 5). Any settings or html code (mainly links) with the full domain name in it, will only go to the specified link and could switch the website version it is going to. That would be quite annoying each time it happens. By default, WordPress cannot handle two domains for one WordPress implementation, but a nice plugin called Domain Mirror can handle that for those who want to try it. It will change blog title and blog navigation links, but it won’t change links in the blog posts. I have used full URLs in my posts because originally as I recall, RSS feeds weren’t expanding to the full links. So I’d have to go through one-by-on and change these to relative URLs … in 700 blog posts!

Where do I stand now on this? I thought this was going to be simple to pick one method and just use it. But each of the 6 methods has its advantages and disadvantages and there is no clear cut winner here.

Final decision? For now, I’m going to procrastinate on this and get back to Behold development.

—————–

Followup: The Google Developers site recommends the following:

Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.

So Google recommends #3 in my list above, which is what everyone seems to be calling “Responsive Web Design”. Actually, it’s pretty awesome. Here I found “10 Incredible Examples of Responsive Web Design“. Searching on the Internet, there is A LOT of material on it.

This is likely the way I’ll ultimately go. I’ll only have to maintain one site and that will be both easiest and best. What I’ll do then is save my beholdgenealogy.mobi site for when I develop the mobile versions of Behold.

First of all, let me reassure those of you who still are looking forward to my major promise: direct editing and data entry from the Everything Report. Well that is still my number one goal. That is the primary objective of Behold and will boost Behold from being just a utility program into being a full-featured genealogy program. And I’ll get there. But there are also a number of other very important ideas and concepts that I’m trying to bring to reality as well.

Right now, there’s the current version that I’m working on. The previous version of Behold, 1.0.4 was released in February. I’ve NEVER had such a long time between releases before. I got stuck for some time on the implementation of Life Events – which maybe would better be called Family Events (but that doesn’t sound nearly as sexy). These Life/Family Events will present your data to you in a better way than ever before. But it is quite different than anything you’ve seen before, and I’m a bit worried about how the reaction to it will be. Hopefully there will be way more thumbs up to it than thumbs down, because I think it’s the right way to go and I can’t see me reverting back.

The simultaneous side benefit that will be included with the Life/Family Events will be consistency/sanity checking that will check the age of the individual for each of their events and ensure that everything makes sense. All inconsistencies will be reported right there in the Everything Report where they happen. So when editing is included in Behold, you’ll be able to fix these problems almost effortlessly. And because of the degree to which I’m handling these events (including half-family, step-family, in-laws, adoptions, etc.), the consistency checking should turn out to be one of the most comprehensive available in any program. I’m very happy about this. The next version to be called 1.1 will be released soon and will include Life/Family Events and comprehensive consistency checking.

What else happened that’s affecting my future plans:

1. Tamura Jones reviewed Behold 1.0 back in December and said ““Behold 1.5 will include GEDCOM export, and if the quality of the exported GEDCOM is as high as promised, its flexible GEDCOM import and quality GEDCOM export will combine to make Behold a must-have GEDCOM to GEDCOM conversion utility.” Well, that wasn’t on my roadmap at the time, but now it is.
2. I attended RootsTech in February and realized that what people want most is Evidence/Conclusion modeling and Source-based data entry – so those are now in my plans.
3. In February I got Behold certified as Windows 7 Compatible. A lot happened behind the scenes to make that a reality – and learning how Microsoft wants developers to design a program is important. I’m ready now for Windows 8 and excited for it. If a developer doesn’t keep up, he/she’ll get left behind.
4. I’ve been staying involved and keeping up with the BetterGEDCOM, FHISO, and GEDCOM X initiatives working to produce a new genealogy data transfer standard to replace GEDCOM. The presentations of ideas, discussions, and even the disagreements and arguments have all helped to solidify my thinking about the right direction for Behold to go.
5. Embarcadero came out with Delphi XE2. Now I actually have the potential to make Behold a 64-bit program and make it available on other platforms.
6. I just started using a Windows Phone a few weeks ago. I realized that Behold will ultimately need to be able to work on all platforms: desktop (Windows, Mac, Unix), handheld (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), and will need to sync data online (DropBox, iCloud, Sky Drive, Google Drive).
7. I took some photos of cemetery headstones of some of my family members with my Windows Phone. The GPS coordinates are embedded in the photos … leading to more obvious ideas.
8. I purchased the beholdgenealogy.mobi domain a few days ago. I’m looking at some simple ways of making a mobile version of the Behold website. My head is bursting from the learning experience.

It doesn’t stop. The information gathering and planning and doing and incorporating new thinking are a big part of the software development process. I’m trying to ensure Behold will truly help you do your genealogy the right way.

It’s fun. It’s exciting. But it takes time, and there’s lots to do.

My friend is a Mac guy and I’m a Windows guy (yes, we continue to battle that one out) and I didn’t immediately follow up and go with Google’s Picasa, but instead opened a Windows Live account. There I was able to post my pics for my friends.

Little did I realize what these simple online photo sharing services would turn into. Up until a couple of weeks ago, when I got my Windows Phone, I hadn’t used my Windows Live account for more than photo sharing. But the phone wanted access to my account. It wanted to be able to upload and download photos to what Microsoft has since named its SkyDrive. It wanted to be able to upload and download Office files. It wanted to use the SkyDrive as a storage area for Apps, for PDF files, for music and for videos. And then it lets you decide who gets permission to see or edit these files. And then the online Office apps can be used by your friends to update Word or Excel or PowerPoint or OneNote files. And files can be synched between the SkyDrive and your Smart Phone and your Desktop computer. It even acts as a file backup area, so I put up all my current working Delphi files necessary to build Behold up there as a fail-safe backup. Then I wouldn’t have anything to worry about If a meteorite crashed into Winnipeg destroying my onsite and offsite backups at the same time … well, if that happened, I might still have a slight concern.

But then today, I discovered that Microsoft very recently released their SkyDrive  App for Windows. I installed this on my desktop computer, and all of a sudden, the SkyDrive became a folder in Windows Explorer. I could access and open and copy and paste and drag and drop files from SkyDrive as if they were on my own Computer and not have any idea they were not. As a test, I even used my Beyond Compare (my file comparison program) to see if it could sync and compare files between my machine and the SkyDrive – and it was flawless in its execution and as fast as FTP.

Okay, so Sky Drive’s not the only trick in the book. Apple iCloud and Google Drive and DropBox have been doing this for years. Yes that’s true. But other than the small differences, there are two major reasons why Microsoft’s implementation is so rad.

1. Microsoft is integrating the SkyDrive into their Operating Systems and Office System for all their devices. I love this vision. You have access to everything everywhere without having to think about it.

2. Microsoft is making this available on all platforms. They have Apps for the Mac, for the iPhone and for Android to access SkyDrive. Their Office apps also work on Macs and have direct access to SkyDrive.

To me, this is what will carry Microsoft’s “cloud” higher than Apple, Google’s, or anyone else’s. Once Windows 8 and Windows 8 Phone comes out, the Sky will be the limit (pun intended).

Now what does this mean for genealogy and for Behold? Well, I’m glad I’m seeing what’s going on and I have to keep thinking forward to what we genealogists will expect in our genealogical applications. We’ll want our data in the cloud, so we can use it and share it and update it anywhere. We’ll want access to it on any platform – Desktop or Laptop (Windows or Mac or Unix for geeks), Tablet, or iPhone, or Android Phone, or Windows Phone, And we’ll want to use one program to access it all consistently, without worry of data loss, with one interface to learn, with a complete set of capabilities on all platforms. (And if it would have source-based data entry with evidence/conclusion modeling – that would be nice, too).

There is a new program, the first genealogy application available for the Windows Phone, that actually makes use of SkyDrive. The program is called Relative History and it downloads your GEDCOM from the SkyDrive and displays some information from it. The program is far from perfect and failed in loading 2 of the 5 test GEDCOMs I gave it. But it does illustrate the concept. I was impressed (by the concept, not the program) and I look forward to presenting the real deal with Behold when I get to develop it for all the different platforms. I am very excited about what is to come.

(And for those of you who simply want to know when the next release of Behold is coming … I’m working on it. I really am.)

I’m personally scheduled to give 8 presentations:

• Evidence-conclusion modeling. What it is. How to do it. - You already know how important it is to record your sources, but it’s so tedious. Here are ways to streamline the process and make it work for you.
   
• Genealogy software: choosing & using - Are you using the right tools to help with your genealogy? The range of software is amazing. You’re bound to find a few for you in this quick rundown.
   
• Gensoftreviews: reviews and ratings of all the genealogy software - Did you know there are well over 600 computer programs available for genealogy? GenSoftReviews is the like TripAdvisor, but for genealogists. It uses user reviews to judge the quality of each program. Come learn how you can use GenSoftReviews to help you find and decide on new genealogy software to try.
   
• Jewish genealogy: what’s different and where to find it - If you are researching a Jewish connection in your family tree, here is everything that’s different about Jewish Genealogy that you’ll need to know, and the resources you’ll need to do it.
   
• Using life events and ages to solve genealogy problems - There’s a wealth of data in important event dates of your ancestors’ lives. The dates provide ages which not only allow consistency checking, but also help you solve problems.
   
• Warning! Data won’t transfer: GEDCOM transfers - Don’t lose the data you’ve spent hundreds of hours entering into your genealogy program. Learn about GEDCOM transfers, its limitations, and what you should do about it.
   
• Why Behold? - Are you ready for: Seeing all your data in one report; Instant organization; Multiple languages everywhere; Editing like in a word processor; Source-based data entry; Evidence/conclusion modeling; Virtual Merging. The template has been laid.
   
• Why genealogy is everyone’s solemn duty - We know you’re an avid genealogist, and you know genealogy is one of the best hobbies in the world. What you don’t know is why you and everyone else must do it. Here are two dozen aspects of genealogy that will inspire you. How many have you tried?

If you’re thinking of coming on this cruise, it leaves from and returns to Sydney, Australia, and visits New Caledonia and Fiji. It is Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas and was the largest cruise ship in the world when it was built in 1999.

Now is the time to book. One of the grades of cabins is already sold out. Once they’re all gone, it’s too late.

My wife and I will be staying in Sydney for a few days before and a few days after the cruise. We haven’t booked our hotels yet, but Jill Ball (Geniaus) has just posted helpful information for that.

If there are Behold users who are planning to go on the cruise, we’ll definitely get together. If you can’t do the cruise but live in or near Sydney, let me know and we can try to get together for lunch or supper while I’m there.

First, you will be able to find your way back to it. And anyone you give the picture to will be able to find it as well.

Second, you can map it. Mapping is an excellent way to see new relationships between your relatives. If they lived, worked, or were buried near each other, that may be a clue.

But most of all, it is a seldom recorded but very important information necessary to document a photo. You not only need to know the who, what, when and why, but the where as well. No better way than to have it accurately and automatically recorded in the EXIF data of the photo. No fuss, no muss, no worry, it’s there.

I looked at the current generation of GPS cameras available. They’re all big. I have carried my wonderfully compact Canon ELPH SD600 in my pocket every day for the last 5 years or so and have taken maybe 5,000 shots and videos with it. It’s been great for me. But it lacks a GPS. I tried GPS accessories and attempts to Sync the GPS info into the picture afterwards with software on my computer. What a pain!

So I secretly hoped my little ELPH would break on me, or “accidentally” drop so that I’d need a new camera. But it wouldn’t.

Other than being big (the only current exception is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TXn00V models – but what’s big for the Sonys is their price tag), they are satellite only, vary in their ability and length of time, and how out-in-the-open they must be to pick up a signal. Also their GPS is a big drain on their batteries.

The one camera that was different is the Casio Exilim EX-H20G. I was intrigued by this one. It won awards for its innovative Hybrid GPS that used an internal accelerometer to continue to determine your position even when the GPS signal gets lost, such as when there’s tall buildings around or when your indoors. Yes! It continues to work indoors! And on top of that, it had longer battery life than most non-GPS cameras, even with the GPS always on.

I looked around and that Casio model was hard to find. About 6 months ago, stores in North America were clearing it out for around $200. Henry’s still had it on it’s website for that price. I ordered one about 6 weeks ago. After a month with the order status continuing to say “processing order”, I finally emailed them. They responded that this model was no longer available, cancelled my order, and I was never charged.

The model was still available on eBay through reputable Asian sellers. But now my worry about why the model was taken off the market in North America led me to think I should pass on it. I searched the web for reasons for the camera’s withdrawal. All I found were good reviews for the camera from 18 months ago when the camera first came out. But nothing about why it’s no longer available.

Meanwhile, my cellphone was over 3 years old. I was happy with it. It was a Samsung flip open phone that twinged old memories by being reminiscent of the Star Trek communicator. It was all I needed for the occasional phone call and text message. The $10 a month plan my family locked into was a great deal.

But because of my general interest in computer trends, I’ve been following the latest in SmartPhones and Pads. My daughters and wife all have iPod Touch’s. And just about everywhere I go, people have iPhones, iPads, Android Phones, and (here in Canada) Blackberrys.

What caught my eye a while back though, was the Windows Phone. My cousin who works for Microsoft, showed me one a few years ago and even back then, I thought it was impressive. It seemed appealing to me to have a phone that can open and do limited editing to Microsoft Office files, sync pictures and data with a Sky Drive in a person’s Windows Live account, and download maps so that GPS mapping apps can still work without needing an expensive monthly data plan.

I just happened to have a few minutes last weekend and I wandered into a Future Shop store and thought I’d take a look at the Windows Phones they have. I didn’t realize that because my current phone was paid off, they had a promotion where I could keep my current $10 a month plan, NOT have to get a data plan, and upgrade my phone to a Nokia Lumia 710 for … $0.  No brainer! 

What? But I needed a camera with GPS. Of course, I knew the SmartPhones all have GPS which use satellite but also get assistance from the cellular network. And they have cameras that are not the greatest, but are passable for 98% of what I need. And they have HD video that’s better than what I had on my Casio.

Not only that, but the one device is less volume and less weight than my ELPH camera because it is half the thickness.

Take a look on the left at what I was carrying around in one pocket before: A camera in a (by now) worn out leather case and a cellphone. On the right is the one Nokia Lumia 710 device I now carry around instead.

What did I get? Did I get a camera as part of a toy. Well, I’ve looked at some of the thousands of apps available. Yes, almost all the apps are toys. They pale in comparison to what most programs for desktops or laptops can do. They are mostly toy programs.

But the Windows Phone idea is different. It’s current Operating System: Windows Phone 7.5 is weak, just like Android and iOS. Behold would have to be cut down considerably in features and capability to run on these devices. But around the corner, Windows 8 is coming. This is a major step for computing. Microsoft is making one Operating System for Desktops AND handhelds! Behold and almost any other Windows program will probably be able to run with few or no modifications on a Windows 8 Phone when they come out this fall. Amazing, and I can’t wait!

So in the meantime, I’m using this free-phone opportunity to get used to the handheld world. By seeing how the apps work on them now, I’ll get a better feeling of how I’ll need to set up Behold so it will work well on both desktops and handhelds once Windows 8 is out.

Now what the heck are “Life Events”? My idea are that they are anything in a person’s life that is significant enough to change that person’s life in some real way, Often these events are formal happenings with many invited guests and would be important enough that the person likely would have attended – even if it was far away.

The significance in genealogy is that by identifying these events, you may get clues that can lead to more discoveries. If you find your grandfather’s sister got married in Oklahoma City, then there’s reason to believe that your grandfather may have travelled there for the wedding. You may find a relative (maybe of your grandfather’s sister) who went to the wedding, talked to your grandfather, and has pictures and stories for you.

Piecing these events together forms a timeline of a person’s life. You want to select just the right ones to include to make the timeline as useful as possible without it turning it into an overwhelming set of information that just becomes too much.

There are two things to consider: The events, and who the events happen to.

First the events.

This is the list I came up with, and is what I’m proposing be the default list of Life Events in Behold:

Birth, Adoption, Baptism, Blessing, Christening, Confirmation, Communion, Bar Mitzvah, Graduation, Endowment, Ordination, Marriage, Divorce, Annulment, Emigration, Immigration, Death

If you disagree with any of these, or think there are others (must be a GEDCOM tag) that should be included, please let me know.

I’ll probably allow you to customize which are included and which are not, but everyone will want a reasonably good default list to start with, and may never see the need to customize.

Next: Who the events happen to.

For anyone, their own events are obviously the most important.This includes their marriage and all the events they share with their partner. These have always been shown in Behold. What’s different is that these are now shown in date order and will be integrated with any Life Events of the close relatives that happen between the day they are born and the day they die.

So which close relatives? These are the ones I believe make significant events:

1. Husband, wife, spouse, partner – starting from the earliest date that you became a couple.

2 (a). Son, daughter, child (legal) – all events for them.

2 (b). Son, daughter, child (adopted); son daughter, child (fostered) – all events from the date of adoption or fostering.

2 (c). Son, daughter, child (biological) – if the biological child is not also the legal child, then usually only the birth will be significant, since the child was raised by someone else. Unfortunately, most genealogy programs don’t distinguish this properly.

2 (d). Stepson, stepdaughter, stepchild – these are your spouse’s children from a previous partner. You’ll want their events from the earliest date your spouse and you became a couple.

2 (e). Son-in-law, daughter-in-law, child-in-law – all events from the date your child became a couple. Technically the in-law’s are through marriage. Might have to call them: son’s partner, daughter’s partner, child’s partner if they were not married, but it would be nicer to have a proper term.

3 (a). Father, mother, parent (legal) – all events for them.

3 (b). Father, mother, parent (adoptive); father, mother, parent (foster) – all events from the date of adoption or fostering.

3 (c). Father, mother, parent (biological) – same idea as for biological children. Really only their names and ages at the time of birth. Of course, if they reunite later in life, there could be other events, but gosh, this could get complicated. Again, today’s genealogy software doesn’t do a good job with biological/legal differences. This is a future task for Behold.

3 (d). Stepfather, stepmother, stepparent – all events from the earliest date that they and your parent became a couple.

3 (e). Father-in-law, mother-in-law, parent-in-law – all events from the date you and your partner became a couple.

4 (a). Brother, sister, sibling – all events during your life, plus the ages of your older siblings when you were born.

4 (b). Halfbrother, halfsister, halfsibling – same as for sibling.

4 (c). Stepbrother, stepsister, stepsibling – all events from the earliest date that their parent and your parent became a couple.

4 (d). Adoptive brother, foster brother, etc. – this is starting to grow in complexity, isn’t it?

4 (e). Brother-in-law, sister-in-law, sibling-in-law (ugh!) – this will include both types of sibling in-laws. i.e. Your brother-in-law can be your wife’s brother or your brother’s wife. In the former case, it will include all events from the date you and your partner became a couple. In the latter case, it will include all events from the date your brother and his partner became a couple.

5. Grandson, granddaughter, grandchild – all events. Not sure if we should ignore or consider all the step/adoptive/foster designations here.

6. Grandfather, grandmother, grandparent – all events after your birth, as well as the ages of your grandparents when you were born.

Where to stop is the question?  I think this is about the place. You’ll have enough events in each person’s timeline to really get a feeling of what their life will be like.

You can make the case to add a few more relatives, for example:

7.(?) Great-grandparents, great-grandchildren – If they are living during your lifespan, then there will be a considerable age gap and they likely won’t be living with you or be in contact with you much. There are exceptions of course. But if you had 50 great-grandchildren, you probably won’t remember their names and you’d have to be very healthy and energetic to attend all of their events. The significance would be the fact of having 50 great-grandchildren, but their events would be noise.

8.(?) Uncles, aunts, first cousins – You’ll probably see them more often when you’re kids, but less frequently when you’re adults. You’ll likely get invited and go to their weddings, but is that enough to say that their Life Events are significant upon yours? Adding cousins adds a whole order of magnitude to the number of events you’ll bring it. It’s better to add a custom event to your own information to say that you attended your cousin’s wedding, than to try to include them all automatically.

In this delicate scheme of setting up Life Events, I think the right place to stop is back at: 6. the grandparents. In the future, I know I’ll want to add Place Events as well. Those will be events associated with a place (e.g. Earthquake, fire, general strike) and if you lived in the place at the time, it would automatically be included with your Life Events.

What do other programs do? Well, some have what they call a timeline report. They can produce a timeline of events for a specific person. It will include spouse, parent and children events. I don’t think any go as far as including siblings, step-family, in-laws, grandparents or grandchildren. And none of them do the events for everybody at once. So Behold will be quite unique in this regard.

By the way, if you won’t want to see the Life Events, you’ll be able to switch them off with a single button press. But I think you’ll leave them on.

It turned out that during the alpha versions of Behold, when it was pre-Unicode, that I had added some custom sorting routines to try to do the various locales correctly. But when I added Unicode for the first beta version, I hadn’t properly removed all of them. First thing was to try to get rid of them and see if Windows sorting can take over. Unfortunately, I did not happen to have a Czech version of Windows to test with, and I found that just changing the various language settings within my English version of Windows was not good enough. So I had to send the hopefully-fixed Behold over to my friend in Prague for testing. Fortunately, that appears to have done it. So this fix will be in the next release.

The key point of all this is really that sorting of data is core functionality of any program. You’ve just got to get it right. If it doesn’t work, you’ve got to make that top priority and get it working. I’m lucky (barring getting bad news from further testing) that this only took a couple of days to pin down.

There are cases where some very notable programs don’t get some important core stuff right. One I’m extremely frustrated with is the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel. Throughout Windows and all Windows products and all third party products built for Windows (including Behold), a key item is the Windows clipboard. You can from any application copy an item to the clipboard. It will stay there until you need it, or until you overwrite it with something you subsequently copy to the clipboard. Any time later, you should be able to paste whatever is in your clipboard back into your program. But not with Excel. In Excel, you have to paste from the clipboard immediately after you copy. If you do another operation after the copy, you are no longer able to paste. I shake my head in dismay every time I think of this. Here we are, dozens of versions into Excel, and Microsoft has still not endowed it with some important core functionality that should have been in it from the start.

Overall, Excel is an impressive program – able to calculate a billion items in a single bound. It does so much stuff (I mean it’s even got a whole programming language built into it) that sometimes you forget it is supposed to be primarily a spreadsheet. But they must have had some programming dropouts design its a regression package that’s horrendous to use, a charting facility that’s so menu driven, it takes forever to do anything, and of course they’re still mostly brain-dead over their unwillingness to correct a core feature like their copy and paste. It’s hard to get something right the first time. Excel is one place where I see that Microsoft is continuing to add extra features into its periphery, but they’re sadly abandoning the important core functionality that makes the program intuitive and simple to use.

Generally I like Microsoft’s products. Some of them are excellent, and I’m writing this blog entry with Windows Live Writer, which I just love. They’ve made everything seamless, and entering a hyperlink or adding a picture is easier than any other html editor that I’ve tried.

I’m also really looking forward to Windows 8, and may get a Windows 8 phone when they come out. The Windows Surface tablet looks like it will be amazing, and Apple and the Androids might have to be just a bit wary. Why does it appear amazing? Again it’s down to its core functionality. They’re building a solid base and trying to make sure its right. Will they deliver what they promise? We’ll soon see.

I’m involved in BetterGEDCOM and poke around GEDCOM X as well, where new standards to replace GEDCOM are possibly forthcoming. I’m currently worried about some of the decisions that went in the GEDCOM X core. They’ve picked a model that is very complex and would be quite overbearing on both developers and programs that use the standard. There’s quite a bit of discussion going on about a need to change this core functionality.Again, I say, it’s very important to get this core functionality right. It’s even more important to get it right if it’s becoming a standard that others will have to follow.

I’m going to be making some major “core” changes soon. Once version 1.5 with GEDCOM export and a native data file is completed, I’ll be attempting to convert Behold over to FireMonkey framework. If I’m successful, then Behold should be able to be run on PCs (as a 32 bit program or as a 64 bit program), on a Mac, on iOS, and (not quite possible yet … but soon) on Android and Linux. I won’t have to worry about Windows devices, since any program that will run on a Windows 8 desktop, should also run on a Windows 8 device. This will be very exciting, and I’m looking forward to getting to that point so I can try Behold on the different platforms.

But until then, back to getting Version 1.1 out.

Up to now, I’ve been following the traditional genealogy software way of presenting families. You have the father, the mother, their children and the family events. I’ve been doing this by presenting the father and his individual events, followed by the mother and her individual events, followed by the “family” with links to the children and the family’s individual events.

In my Life Events post, I alluded to this change, and even showed before and after screenshots of Behold. Here’s the “before” shot again:

Look at how this very much resembles a traditional Family Group sheet. It also follows the GEDCOM way of having INDI (individual) and FAM (family) records that are connected via spouse/husband/wife/parent/child links.

My foray into Life Events, however, has added the events of each individual, their traditional “family” and their extended family into their own information and is turning those into a life timeline. In so doing, the former “family” events, e.g. marriage, children, etc. are repeated in both the father and mother’s information – but are given the proper context in relation to their own life. In my evaluation, that is exactly what you, the genealogist, want to see and know about.

Are we losing something by eliminating the family? I think not.

First of all, what is a family and what are family events anyway? It seems obvious when you first think about it, but once you go into detail, it becomes nebulous. What if they couple doesn’t marry? Do adopted family, half family or step-family count as the family. Is the family only those living together at the time? Is the father part of the family after the divorce and he moves out? Do the grandparents who live upstairs count?

The reason why you would want family events, is because you want them to pertain to *all* the people in the family. But that changes continuously and is ambiguous depending of your opinion of what constitutes a family.

A better way in my opinion is to eliminate the current genealogical version of the family concept. Over at BetterGEDCOM, there have been several discussions questioning the need for a family entity.

At GEDCOM X, they’ve eliminated the family and instead have relationships. The relationship types are: Couple or Parent/Child.  You then go and show your conclusion as to why you believe the relationship is true based on evidence. That makes more sense to me than trying to “prove” a family entity (whose composition keeps changing) exists.

You might think a census record shows what looks like a family at a point in time. But it really only shows relationships (head of family, spouse, son, daughter) and people who lived at the same address at the same time. You read that and you “imply” some sort of family to it.

The question is how do you represent events of the family-at-the-time that happen to whoever you define as the family at the time. (chicken and egg?) 

I think the answer is to have a Group record. This can be any number of people together for any reason. People may join and leave the group, and events can happen to the group. The census would thus be attached to the group of people living together at that address. Each event in which the person was a member of the group can then be transferred to the individuals as some of their Life Events.

This would be relatively simple to implement in Behold in a future version. I think long term it is the way to go. I hope (and I’ll be pushing for) future standards such as BetterGEDCOM or GEDCOM X to implement a Group record in this manner. And groups will be able to be used for anything: societies, attendees at a wedding, people on a ship. It will be tremendously useful.

So I conclude all this by saying: “Family be gone. Bring on the Group.”

—

Followup: Tamura Jones wrote over a year and a half ago about the Family in Scientific Genealogy stating that the family unit is not a genealogical concept. Trying to define it could “prove harmful to a good understanding of genealogy and good genealogical practice”. “People do not belong to just one family” and “Genealogy software should support every possible family structure”.

A sideline thought also brought out from that article: “Some people say their dog is part of their family, and quite a few definitions would agree.” Well, whether family or not, it can’t be denied that your ancestors’ pets were a very important part of their lives. The events involving their pets would have affected them. Wouldn’t you want these events documented in your ancestors’ lives? Maybe you could enter the pet as an individual in your genealogy allowing proper documentation of the affecting events. For that matter, maybe your genealogy software should be able to include your pet’s pedigree alongside your own. (p.s. I’ve had pets in Behold’s future plans for a while)

They’ve now made their data format public. I’ve really only had a cursory look at it. I don’t have time currently to go into detail into exactly what their structures are. My main concern is that GEDCOM X will represent some of its data structures in very different ways than most genealogy programs, e.g. no family record and just relationships. Almost every program uses the GEDCOM lineage-linked structure with families and individuals and FAMC, FAMS, HUSB, WIFE and CHIL connectors. It would seem logical that programmers should change their internal structures to something else if that something else became the new standard. But that’s asking a lot.We’re talking about ripping out the guts of a program. If the structures are easily mappable, then they could be handled. But if they’re easily mappable, then why is a new standard needed at all?

I did try their GEDCOM 5.5 to GEDCOM X translator on one file, and then unzipped the file to see that it made a thousand JSON XML files. There is no inherent difference between XML and the GEDCOM grammer. They are probably mappable back and forth.

There are quite a number of JSON XML components for Delphi to choose from, e.g: https://www.google.com/search?q=delphi+xml but I personally don’t look forward to having to implement such a thing. With GEDCOM, I’m in control of the way Behold parses and I can optimize it appropriately.With 3rd party packages, it’s someone else’s code.

Converting the input between GEDCOM, XML, JSON or whatever is the easy (almost trivial and mechanical) part. The hard part will be incorporating the concepts that GEDCOM X has that GEDCOM and Behold don’t have into Behold. That is the part that scares me. If the differences are considerable, then it will severely hamper GEDCOM X’s full adoption into existing programs. That will give the horrible result of partial incorporation, meaning that GEDCOM X will not transfer all data between all programs, and thus be no better than GEDCOM is today.

For example, you can’t expect programs that don’t have an extensive citation capability to add one just because they find it in GEDCOM X. Or what if they had one, but it was structured very differently. And if GEDCOM X decides to throw in every possibility under the sun, or complicate things with complex multi-level multi-linked structures, you’ll be sure some programs just won’t get them right, or will refuse to do them to the level specified. The more complex the spec, the harder it will be to interpret correctly, and the more resistant the developer will be to implementing it.

GEDCOM X will have to be comprehensive, yet be as simple as possible. Those are two goals that work against each other, so it will be difficult to get the balance just right. It will have to use a 99% rule, and not try to include the other .999% which will increase the complexity level 1000-fold.

GEDCOM X will need allies. They’ll need to work with the FHISO folk. They’ll have to be wary of Ancestry.com and MyHeritage who have their own data transfer ideas. They’d likely also want to get AncestorSync involved early on.

I’m hoping for it. I really am. But they’ll have a hard sell.

—–

June 9: Ryan Heaton corrected me. GEDCOM X uses XML, not JSON. I’ve updated my post to reflect this.

I made five earlier attempts to implement Life Events, and each time I learned something, but decided to start over. This time I think I’ve finally got it right and will attempt to finish this part of this (long awaited) version in the next few weeks.

Then consistency checking which I mostly got done along the way, will be cleaned up, will be checked (so I’m checking checking), and then this version can be released.

The Life Events and Consistency Checking are major enough that the next version will not be called 1.0.5, but instead will be 1.1.  I was trying to avoid 1.1 because technically, I have to submit new point versions back to Microsoft to recertify for the Windows 7 Logo. But I know I didn’t add any incompatibilities, and important future versions that will need checking are forthcoming. I’ll wait until then to resubmit.

Here are some other things that have been happening:

• I became a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists
   
• I’ve been looking for a camera with GPS capabilities. So far, the lot of them take time to sync, may not give accurate results, use lots of battery power and don’t work indoors. Then I found out about the Casio EX-H20G with an innovation award winning Hybrid GPS. That’s a game changer, even though the rest of the camera is nothing special. It seems it’s been very hard to get in North America during the last year. I don’t know why. I ordered it from Henry’s and hopefully they can track it down for me.
   
• Once I get my GPS camera, I’m going to re-take the 200 cemetery headstones and scores of photos of important locations in my family’s history here in Winnipeg. They’ll be GPS encoded into the EXIF info in the pictures and will be Google mappable, etc. A future version of Behold (after version 2.0) will include photo handling and will do some great things with your photo EXIF data. Hopefully I can do something with face detection, too. But because I want and need it, you can be assured that Behold will have it one day.
   
• Speaking of mapping your locations, a new social site started up called uencounter.me that is map based, and allows you to mark places with dates and events. It sounds like a great site for genealogists to record the important places in our family history, and may help us find other people who are researching the same places, or who actually live near the sites you are interested in.
   
• I got a surprise email from a volunteer support missionary who said she it one of hundreds from around the world who are available 24/7 to answer questions about PAF and the LDS website. She said PAF was supported and I shouldn’t say it isn’t on GenSoftReviews. So I did the test and emailed the supposed PAF support people to see if they would respond. To my surprise they do respond, and there is support. So even if there will never be a new release of PAF, they do actually provide help for the current version. I removed the “unsupported” designation that was on PAF at GenSoftReviews.
   
• I took a look at the new GEDCOM X file formats (announced yesterday). Let me just say it isn’t simple. It’s not going to be easy for hundreds of old-school genealogy developers to jump through hoops and learn new tricks. It will take a few big players, other than FamilySearch, to give it some momentum.
   
• Tamura Jones wrote about the GEDCOM X Converter and concluded that “The GEDCOM X file format makes GEDCOM look good.”
• Meanwhile, lot’s of action over at BetterGEDCOM where discussions are still happening. There was concern that Wikispaces didn’t back up discussions, but the BetterGEDCOM gang thankfully found a way around that. FHISO is gaining momentum where Ancestry.com just became a founding member.
   
• And I was surprised to discover a Chess Programming Wiki over at Wikispaces which is already an excellent reference tool. They even have a page for me and for my long-retired program Brute Force.
   
• Search for “Behold” on Google. It’s still on the 1st results page even though there are 134,000,000 sites to choose from.

There are 6 sources in the example. This is what would happen with source based data entry in Behold as you find each one and add the relevant information for it before going on to the next.

1. Source: Conversation with Grandma
   Person of interest: John Doe (her grandfather, my g-g-grandfather)
   PFACTs:
   - Death: between 1904 and 1906 in Ourtown, Alabama (she was not yet in
      school, and she started school in 1906)
   - Birth: around 1830 in Histown, Connecticut (he was in his seventies)
   Confidence: not so high, Grandma wasn’t so sure herself

You would enter this as a source in Behold:

S1  Conversation with Grandma
   Death of John Doe, between 1904 and 1906 in OurTown, Alabama
      Note: Grandma was not yet in school and she started school in 1906.
   Birth of John Doe, around 1830 in Histown, Connecticut
      Note: He was in his seventies.
   Note: John Doe was her grandfather.
   Note: Grandma wasn’t so sure herself.

What you have done is entered the information about all the events mentioned in the source. You are NOT adding any interpretation to it, and you are spelling the name and place just as they were on the record. Each event is listed separately, following by the name, date and place of the event. If there is any other information about each event, then it is added as notes on the event. Other information about the source is added as notes on the source.

Important: At this point John Doe is not a person, a persona, or anything you want to call it. It is simply a name. You may enter hundreds of names in your sources, and they may have many weird spelling variations and may or may not be people you are interested in.

Theoretically one day (I’m trying to promote this), you’ll be able to download a file of source information from an archive or library, and extract information that may match your relatives (via name variations, date and/or place). A subset of BetterGEDCOM made just for source information would allow this. It is my opinion that source information needs to be completely separated from all personal conclusions, conjectures or any form of interpretation. As Joe Friday said: “”All we want are the facts, ma’am””.

A few of comments about example 1 that was provided:

1. PFACT is a term invented mostly by Tom Wetmore on BetterGEDCOM and is short for property–fact-attribute-characteristic-trait. This refers to anything that isn’t an event, with the difference being that events usually have a time and place, whereas PFACTs usually don’t. So the term is shown incorrectly in these examples because it is used to head a list of events, not a list of PFACTS.

2. I don’t know why the example added the note: “He was in his seventies” after the birth event and not the death event. None-the-less, you should accurately place information from the source where it occurred, and DON”T interpret that it was wrong when you list the source information. You can do that in your conclusion.

3. The “Confidence: not so high” was NOT added to the source. That is a personal opinion of the value of the source and not part of the source. That will be added to the person information later.

Okay. That took a long time. Now we want to use that first source information to create a person named John Doe. The way I’m hoping you will be able to do that would be to put your cursor in the Birth event of the source, and right-click and select “Create person from source event”. The person information will be added to Behold and will display as:

——————————————————- DOE-1
1. John Doe
   Birth: about 1830 in HisTown, Connecticut
      Note: He was in his seventies.
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1

The event is added in its entirety along with that incorrect note, which you will be able to delete or change at your leisure.

Also added is a hyperlink to HisTown in the place index and to the source itself. The place entry would be:

Connecticut, HisTown
   Birth: about 1830 –> John Doe

The source itself would also be changed. It would now contain a reference back to the person. It would now look like this:

S1 Conversation with Grandma
   Death of John Doe, between 1904 and 1906 in OurTown, Alabama
      Note: Grandma was not yet in school and she started school in 1906.
   Birth of John Doe, around 1830 in Histown, Connecticut
      Note: He was in his seventies.
   Note: John Doe was her grandfather.
   Note: Grandma wasn’t so sure herself.
   Birth: about 1830 in Histown, Connecticut –> John Doe DOE-1

Notice the last line added. That is no longer data. That is now a link back to the person and the place that this source has been referenced from.

Now let us put our cursor somewhere in the Death event of the source, right-click and say “Add event to John Doe”. Now John Doe becomes:

——————————————————- DOE-1
1. John Doe
   Birth: about 1830 in HisTown, Connecticut
      Note: He was in his seventies.
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
   Death: between 1904 and 1906, age 73 to 78 in OurTown, Alabama
      Note: Grandma was not yet in school and she started school in 1906.
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1

The event is added to OurTown, Alabama in the place index and another link is added on the source. Behold gives the possible age range, and uses 1830 plus or minus 1 year when the “about” keyword is used.

At this point, you’ll want to add your reasoning as to why you came to the conclusions about John Doe. Maybe you’ll correct those notes as well. You’ll do that by simply typing your changes into the John Doe information to give:

——————————————————- DOE-1
1. John Doe
   Birth: about 1830 in HisTown, Connecticut
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
   Death: between 1904 and 1906, age 73 to 78 in OurTown, Alabama
      Note: Grandma was not yet in school and she started school in 1906.
      Note: Grandma said he was in his seventies.
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
   Note: All the info I have about John Doe was from Grandma. My confidence
      in her info is not so high.

Notice how that last note is indented. It is associated with the person and is where you can put your assumptions, conjectures and/or conclusions that are not associated with one specific event.The assessment of the quality of the information is also put here.

Now let’s add a second source. This time it should be easier for you to follow:

2. Source: Handwritten note by Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe
   Person: John Doe
   PFACTs:
   - John Doe died of a heart attack on the 3rd of April 1905, in the front yard of
     his home in Ourtown, while carrying groceries he just brought from the store.
   File: scan of the note.
   Confidence: pretty good.

This should get added into Behold as a new source:

S2  Handwritten note by Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe
   Death of John Doe, the 3rd of April 1905 in the front yard of his home in
      Ourtown.
      Note: died of a heart attack while carrying groceries he just brought from the
         store.
   Daughter of John Doe: Jane Doe

Notice I think you should add the Daughter line so that it is positively recorded that this record indicates that Jane is the child of John.

Right-click on the cursor when it’s in the Death event and select “Add event to John Doe”. Then right-click on the cursor when it’s in the Child line and select “Add relationship to John Doe”.

The result will be:

——————————————————- DOE-1
1. John Doe
   Birth: about 1830 in HisTown, Connecticut
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
   Daughter: Jane Doe DOE-2
      Source: Handwritten note by Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe S2
   Death: between 1904 and 1906, age 73 to 78 in OurTown, Alabama
      Note: Grandma was not yet in school and she started school in 1906.
      Note: Grandma said he was in his seventies.
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
   Death: Mon 3 Apr 1905, age 74 to 75 in the front yard of his home in Ourtown
      Note: died of a heart attack while carrying groceries he just brought from the
         store.
      Source: Handwritten note by Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe S2
   Note: All the info I have about John Doe was from Grandma. My confidence
      in her info is not so high.

——————————————————- DOE-2
   1. Jane Doe
      Father: John Doe DOE-1

Events in Behold are listed in date order except for the Birth and Death events. Those you will be able to sort in order of preference, with the most preferred, so you might want to drag and drop the 2nd death event before the first.

The second death is now superfluous, so it can be removed, but the notes are useful so we’ll keep those.

Certain things are hard for software to do. It would be difficult for Behold to detect for you that “OurTown, Alabama” is the same as “in the front yard of this home in Ourtown”. But you’ll be able to go to the place index and rename the latter to the former to change it (or maybe even drag and drop to make it easier). Then add that front yard info to the note.

Also, you’ll want to edit the notes you originally added when you only had the first source, since you now know more and your assumptions, conjectures and/or conclusions have probably changed. You’ll probably want to change that final note.

You’ll probably end up after these modifications with John as this:

——————————————————- DOE-1
1. John Doe
   Birth: about 1830 in HisTown, Connecticut
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
   Daughter: Jane Doe DOE-2
      Source: Handwritten note by Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe S2
   Death: Mon 3 Apr 1905, age 74 to 75 in OurTown, Alabama
      Note: died of a heart attack in the front yard of his home while carrying
         groceries he just brought from the store.
      Note: Grandma was not yet in school and she started school in 1906.
      Note: Grandma said he was in his seventies.
      Source: Conversation with Grandma S1
      Source: Handwritten note by Jane Doe, daughter of John Doe S2
  Note: Most of the info I have about John Doe was from Grandma. My
      confidence in her info is not so high, but I have pretty good confidence in the
      note by Jane Doe.

So I hope you’re getting the idea. There’s actually four more source examples still to finish. The next source is:

3. Source: Copy of death cert for John D Doe
   - John D Doe died 1905-04-03 at 11 a.m. in Ourtown, Ala.
   - aged 74
   - Cause of death: Heartattack, confirmed by Dr Doc.
   - Handwritten note: “Buried 3 days later, St. Michael’s”
   File: scanned document.
   Confidence: looks official, but have to find out more about the burial.

S3  Copy of death cert for John D Doe
   Death of John D Doe, 1905-04-03 at 11 a.m. in Ourtown, Ala.
      Note: aged 74
      Note: Cause of death: Heartattack, confirmed by Dr Doc.

   S3-1  Handwritten note
      Burial of John D Doe, 3 days after death in St.Michael’s
      Text: “Buried 3 days later, St. Michael’s”

In this case, there is S3-1 which is a source detail. Source detail is used when a source has different parts you want to refer to, such as different pages of a book, or different lines on a census.

John D Doe is a different name than John Doe. When right-clicking to add the event, if the person’s name isn’t spelled perfectly, hopefully I’ll be able to set up Behold to allow you to choose the person to add the event to, or allow you to search for the person you want to add the information to.

The burial is a new event that would get added.

The age of 74 would tell you that John must have been born between April 4th 1830 and April 3rd 1831, so you could update the birthdate info, link this source to that birth event, and add a note stating that the death certificate gave the age 74 and this was used to narrow down the birth date.

Then you can update your assumptions, conjectures and/or conclusions – basically, now you are pretty certain of John’s death date.

4. Source: Birth cert of Johann Doe
   Note: this is the only J. Doe to be found in Histown, Conn that was born in
      1830 +-1
   Person: Johann Doe
   - Born 21st December 1830
   - Parents Hans and Marie Doe
   - in Histown, Conn
   - baptised 25th Dec, catholic
   File: scan
   Confidence: The data is trustworthy, and it’s a really good fit. Could be my
      John D Doe, but needs more proof!

This is a really long exercise, and I’m sure you’re getting as tired of reading as I am of writing and formatting the examples.

The key thing for the 4th source is it’s up to you to make the decision as to how you would classify this person. If you feel you’re reasonably sure that he is the same as your John Doe, then you can add this source’s events and relationships to your John. The name Johann Doe would be added as an alternative name of John Doe that you’d have to find more proof on.

If you don’t feel this person has enough information to be a match, then add him as a new person. This would be a new person with parent info, birth info, baptismal info and location info.  If I build in the GEDCOM ALIA (alias) feature, you’ll be able to link the two people to indicate they may be the same person (so you don’t forget).

5. Source: Birth cert of John Dorian Doe
   Grandma found this in a drawer with other family documents.
   Person: John Dorian Doe
  - Born 3/3/1830
  - to Stephen Doe and his wife Hilda, née Schmidt
  - in Histown, Massachussetts
  - he was their 2nd child
  File: Scan
  Confidence: quite high.
  Note: Grandma says that she wasn’t sure about the “Conn” anyhow.

So … the place was a “Con” (pun intended). What the example was asking is: “how should this correction of conclusion be recorded?”

In my eyes, it’s simple. Simply correct your conclusion data (change the state on the place name Histown for John’s events – either from John himself, or from the Place index), and then record in the assumptions, conjectures and/or conclusions that Grandma originally thought it was Connecticut. That is important to remember. There may be something significant about Connecticut that she got mixed up about. Any clue is a clue that might one day prove useful and shouldn’t be forgotten.

Now about that Johann Doe guy from source 4.  If you didn’t assume he was your John Doe, then you may only have to remove the alias and he’s separated. If you feel he was a complete red herring, you could delete him from your data. But better might be to leave him and add your conclusion that you thought he might be John Doe because he was the only one in Connecticut, but that ended up being the wrong state. Doing so will refresh your memory 20 years from now when you come across him again in some other document.

But if you have added the events of Johann Doe to your John Doe, then what do you do? Well actually, it’s pretty simple. All the events, done from this source-centric method of including them, automatically have their source references attached to them. Simply go to: S4 Birth cert of Johann Doe, and select each event, fact or relationship, right click and pick the option “Disconnect from John Doe” to remove the link. Hopefully, I’ll be to include selection of the whole source, so you can add or remove a number of events at once.

Now isn’t that simple and elegant? It is my vision of how this all should work.

6. Source: Death of Johann Doe
   Article in the Histown (Conn) Paper, 8th Sept 1834
   “A fire consumed Doe’s smithy yesterday, one of the oldest buildings in
      town…”
   “the blacksmith Hans Doe couldn’t save his youngest son, Johann, age 3
      and 3/4…”
   Note: this is to show that Johann Doe of Histown Conn is not my John D Doe.

So now, if you are still interested in this guy, you can add these events to the Johann Doe that you have disconnected from your John Doe.  Who knows. They have the same last name and are only a state apart. Maybe in further research they’ll turn up to be cousins. If they do, you’ll be glad you saved all this work and didn’t delete it.

I’d like you to note a few things about what I’ve done here.

1. This is what I’m proposing that Behold in Version 2.1 with source-based data entry might be like. It is my belief that this is both the best and the correct way for us to do our genealogy.

2. KISS. It’s got to be simple. Multi-level layers of fluff won’t work for the general populous.

3. Flexible. It’s got to work, not just with this simple example that was proposed on the BetterGEDCOM wiki, but with source types that will challenge persona-based models that disaggregate data, e.g.:

(1.) A Census record which includes multiple generations and side-relatives of a family with piles of info in the one record.

(2.) A seating list at your grandfathers wedding which shows one interesting table of people sitting together that leads you to believe they may have been relatives of each other or had some other relationship (friends, coworkers).

(3.) A clipping about a town fire you didn’t know about that destroyed your ancestors’ neighbours’ homes and that makes you believe it affected their life causing them and possibly other relatives to move to a different city. But nothing specific about your ancestor is mentioned in the article.

If the events are embedded with the source, then these and even more complex types of sources can be handled.

4. The above examples have nothing to do with transfer formats. GEDCOM is only a few tags short of allowing everything here. BetterGEDCOM or GEDCOM X most likely will allow everything here. I just hope BG and GX don’t end up over complicating everything.

5. I would appreciate all comments, criticisms and suggestions. Although I have developed my ideas this far, there are always things that I’ve not thought of and nothing’s set in stone.

In FTM, if you select the “Person” tab, and select the “Timeline” button, you will see all the events for an individual in order of date. It gives the year, person’s age, the event, date and place and sometimes a description.

Now if you then select the Timeline button’s dropdown arrow and select “Show Family Events’, then FTM will add to the green individual events, a number of pink family events.

Here you can see it’s got births, marriages and deaths of children and parents.

Hmm. Doesn’t this seem a lot like the Life Events that I recently blogged about? Well, yes and no. First, I was pleasantly surprised to see that FTM has this feature. They got their foot in the door, but should have made it more important a feature and carried it further. They have it several clicks deep making it difficult to access (or even discover), they do not include sibling events, and although a table layout may seem convenient, their particular setup is not easy to reference or visualize because their two line format interferes with your eyes’ scanning mechanism.

Randy Seaver had explored FTM’s TImeline feature prior to my taking notice of it. He reveals that facts for siblings and grandparents and other relatives were not added to the list. I’ve thought about this with regards to Behold’s life events. I think it is important to include sibling events, since the sibling usually live together and therefore their lives affect each other directly, especially during childhood. Whereas grandparents and others usually live away, and are seen less often. I would, by default, exclude their events, because there’s a trade-off between what’s most relevant, and what’s too much. Randy disagrees about grandparents. I’ll think about them some more.

Then you’d want extended families included, e.g., half-siblings, step-siblings, adopted relatives, 2nd marriages, etc. I’m not sure if FTM detects and displays those correctly or not in their timeline, but I doubt it does.

Randy also noted the non-usefulness of the ability to add historical events which usually are not relevant to most people. I agree on that, and think that one day in a future version of Behold (after version 2), I’d like it to have the ability to add events to places (e.g. so you can note celebrations or catastrophes that happen in your ancestral towns) and then if your relative was living in that place, the event would be automatically be added to their life events, and it would be a significant event to them.

I’m intrigued and impressed that FTM had thought of putting this in, although I think they only did part of the job. I’m glad I found out about this,because it is helping me decide just what it is that genealogists really need in life events that will help them visualize the life of their ancestor.

I’m sure there are other programs that display individual event time-line data in a similar or different ways. If you know of any that do a good job of this, please let me know.

There is nothing wrong with dumb genealogy software, as long as you expect nothing out of it. Don’t expect it to help you do your genealogy, or present your data in a way that will help you come to new conclusions. It will just be a big notepad where everything is written down. At least you won’t forget it … that is, if you can find it again in the usually dumb presentation style of the reports the program produces.

There are some genealogy programs that attempt to do some smart things. GenSmarts works with your existing genealogy file and produces research recommendations. Lineascope attempts to capture, analyze and present chains of genealogical information and evidence. Programs like these are attempting to make your data useful. These are what I’d call “smart” programs, because they interpret your data and try to help you make use of it.

Both GenSmarts and Lineascope are single purpose utility programs. They are designed to work with your data, but are not general purpose data managers where you can store and retrieve all your genealogy data.

The one function that many genealogy programs have that might be close to being thought of as “smart” is that of data merging. Developers have put a lot of thought into finding ways to identify if one person might be the same as another. Are the names similar? Do the dates and places match? Do their spouses, children, parents and siblings have similar names, dates and places? I’m impressed by the amount of sophistication that is in this functionality, and some programs do it almost as smartly as can be done. What blows this “smartness” to bits is the fact that the function of merging other peoples junk data with your own database of thoroughly researched data is one of the DUMBest things anyone would want to do.

I still think all the time about the Genealogical Workflow process that I listened to Ron Tanner present at RootsTech 2012. Their Report Card for the Genealogy Software Industry graded us with a D+, and I concur. It’s because of the dumbnitude of the software available. Just regurgitating data doesn’t do anything to help you (1) Decide what to do, (2) Gather, (3) Analyze, (4) Incorporate or (5) Collaborate. Smartness needs to be added. Programs like GenSmarts and Lineascope help in their own tiny portions of the goal – but we need the bigger picture addressed.

So why am I talking about smart and dumb programs? Because it’s been 3 months since the last version 1.0.4 of Behold, and version 1.0.5 is banging at the boundary between dumbness and some bit of smarts. It’s telling me that Behold is trying to become sentient and do more than just regurgitate data. This has great potential and is stretching the limits of what I thought I was dealing with.

It’s like this: I started with the dumb data – the events and facts of each individual. Through my concept of life events, I’ve taken the data you’ve gathered and incorporated it into a context that is meaningful and allows you to analyze a persons life and help you decide what you next need to do.

But it cries out for more. Listing four people as two sets of parents, birth and adoptive, is no longer good enough. The report must present birth parents intelligently as birth parents, and adoptive parents intelligently as adoptive. Behold is presenting ages at events, and you don’t care how old the adopted parents were when a person was born. What you do care about is how old they were when they adopted the child and how old the child was at the time. Dumb programs don’t give you that sort of information … but smart ones can.

It gets complicated. If the mother remarried and the new husband adopted her child to join her as a legal parent, then you want that presented appropriately. You don’t really want to see 2 families with the mother listed twice and her as adopting her own child. The mother is only one person. I don’t know of any program that can present this properly. But I think doing this is smart and correct and it bothers me when I run various test data sets through the new life events of Behold and information such as this is presented illogically.

I’ve run into dozens of similar examples. I’ve been attempting to “fix” each one and present them “smartly”, and each requires its own customized handling. This isn’t easy, but it is coming along and the parts that I have customized work and work well.

I want to release this new version soon. I know I won’t be able to make it perfect right away – there are just too many cases to handle. So we’ll just have to start it off as best as is possible for now, and then further educate Behold over time.

Is your genealogy software smart or dumb?

1. Tell the developer about it. If they don’t know about it, they won’t fix it.
2. Get the developer to realize it’s a bug. This sometimes is very difficult. Most developers are stubborn, defensive, sure they’re right, and often quite belligerent in their beliefs.
3. Keep bothering the developer until it’s fixed. Developers are busy and often are working on ten things at once. Every month or so, email them back to remind them. Developers will try to fix bugs before adding new features, but sometimes they get lost in the workflow. A kick in the pants every so often helps.

I appreciate knowing about problems in Behold. Every bug that is fixed makes the program that much more reliable and correct. Once a bug is fixed, it usually is fixed for ever (although that’s not guaranteed since sometimes future enhancements can reintroduce the bug).

What is a bug? It’s anything that doesn’t work as it was supposed to.

So I was surprised to read in Tamura Jones’ Sibling Torture Test article that Behold’s warning that the date “13 Apr 2012” is non-standard and should be “13 APR 2012” was incorrect. That, as Tamura said, is what the specification seems to say. But in fact Tamura is correct, and all line_values (and the date value is a line_value) may be of any case, upper, lower or mixed.

This was something I completely missed in all my workings with GEDCOM. I must have read bits and pieces of the standard a hundred times over, but somehow that paragraph in GEDCOM didn’t register in this brain of mine.

Because of this, I interpreted GEDCOM incorrectly. GEDCOM is not simple. Misinterpreting it is easy. This is part of the reason why GEDCOM doesn’t transfer properly between programs … because developers don’t all do GEDCOM perfectly.

Replacements for GEDCOM are being worked on, but to get them to be comprehensive to allow all forms of genealogy data imply they will have some level of complexity. That means there will always be misinterpretation or even mistakes in coding, and you will have incorrect data transfers. These will have to be fixed. Follow the 3 rules at the top of this post.

Mistakes like these can be costly if they aren’t identified. It reminds me of my computer chess days. There I was in the middle of the 9th North American Championship, and my program failed to recognize the opponent’s en passant move and caused the loss of 2 games. This was not a programming error. This was a misinterpretation of the rule. I had read: “The en passant capture must be done on the very next turn, or the right to do so is lost.” Well, I interpreted that as losing the right to do any en passant for the remainder of the game, not just for that one specific en passant. I was not a tournament chess player and I’m embarrassed about that mistake and it cost me. If I’d have known earlier, it would have been fixed.

So thank you Tamura, for pointing out my oversight. The fix will be in the next release 1.0.5 of Behold.

Behold has also been following the general idea of the Family Group Sheet as well. Here is a snapshot of the information for a husband/wife in Behold 1.0.4. It is taken from the Stephen McCarthy Legacy.ged file that comes with Behold as a sample file:

Each “family” in Behold has been divided into three sections: one for the first spouse, one for the second spouse, and one section for the family information. In each section, all the “facts” and “events” pertaining to that person or that family are listed. Behold then adds links to the parents at the end of each person’s information, and links to their children at the end of the family information.

The data is there. It works. It’s dull. And, to be honest, it doesn’t provide you any extra insight into the family than does a Family Group Sheet with the same information.

Well that’s about to change. Version 1.0.5 of Behold, to be released very soon, is taking a concept I’ve been developing since Version 1.0 when I was asked if I could sort the events within each person by date. One thing led to another:

1. Sort events by date
2. Add ages onto dates
3. Merge family information into each spouse
4. Include parent life events
5. Include children life events
6. Include older and younger sibling life events

So what do I mean by “Life Events”?

A life event is some significant event of a parent, sibling, spouse or child that will usually have an impact on a person’s life. Events included are:

Birth, Baptism, Christening, Confirmation, Bar Mitzvah, Adoption, Marriage, Divorce, Death.

Life events put a person’s life into context.

Behold will be displaying every single person’s life events in the Everything Report.

Whoa! What’s going on here. Let’s take a look at how things have transformed. This is what the same family in Version 1.0.5 of Behold will look like:

What we have is now like a mini-timeline of each person’s life. With these simple changes, you will now get a really good feeling of what Eleanor Lannan Cole’s life has been like. Follow along:

Eleanor was born in 1929 when her parents were 31 and 29. She had two older siblings. Thomas died 6 years before she was born, so she never would have known him, but his death might have been an influence on her parents and her family. Her older sister Margaret was 4 when Eleanor was born.

Some undated events (her marriage and children) follow. They would be listed correctly in time with the dated events if they were given a date in the GEDCOM file. But in this case, this lack of information forces you to only learn that she was married to John and had 5 children. This will give you impetus to estimate dates of her marriage and her children’s birth (of course with your sources and reasoning) so that that they will be placed in context within her timeline.

Eleanor had 3 younger siblings: Adelaide was born when Eleanor was 3, Marion was born when Eleanor was 6, and Rosemary was born when Eleanor was 10. These ages sure put things in context for you. It is important to know the environment that Eleanor grew up in, with one older sister and 4 younger ones. Note that Eleanor’s siblings places of birth would also be listed if they were given in the file.

When Eleanor was 25, her older sibling Margaret got married. When she was 36, her younger sibling Adelaide got married. At age 47, Eleanor’s mother died, and at 52, her father died. Whoops, I see I also need to add her husband’s death when Eleanor was 67.

Eleanor is still living and she’s currently 82 years old.

Now. Isn’t this a lot better? Let me know what you think.

For example, let’s say your grandfather died in 1980 and you know he was 80 years old. You’ve looked through all the 1900 records and can’t find his birth certificate anywhere. Maybe the solution is to look through the 1899 records as well.

The trouble is that a person is not said to have reached a certain age until they reach their birthday. So if your grandfather was born on June 15, 1899, then he would have reached his 80th birthday on June 15, 1979, and would have been considered to be 80 years old from June 15, 1979 until June 14, 1980 the day before his 81st birthday.

Working backwards from the date your grandfather died, say May 18, 1980. If you knew he was 80 years old, then he must have been born from May 19, 1899 to May 18, 1900. Someone surely would have mentioned if he died on his birthday, or if he was one day short of reaching his 81st birthday, so sometimes in your research you can get lucky and derive a likely birthday more accurately.

Because of the “birthday” requirement, we spend the first 365 days of our lives being 0 years old. We have not yet reached our first birthday. That is weird. If we could converse at a young age and someone asked us how old we were, we’d say “zero”. So what is normally done is that when we are less than a year old, our age is referred to in how many months old we are. We say the baby is 3 months old, or 9 months old.  Three months old again has that weird meaning, being that it can range anywhere from exactly 3 months, to 4 months less a day. In the first couple of months, parents use “weeks old” and in the first week, they use “days old”.

On the day you were born, you were 0 years old. You were 0 months old. You were 0 weeks old. You were 0 days old. We can get down to hours, minutes and seconds, but they work the same and dates in genealogy are seldom quoted down to the time of the day. The one consideration are twins, with one born just before midnight on December 31, 1899 and the other born just after midnight on January 1, 1900, who just happen to be born on a different day in a different month in a different year.

So then there’s age arithmetic *sigh* which I’ve been having to deal with. If your grandfather was born in 1899 and died in 1980, how old was he when he died? A straight subtraction gives 81. But, we know he was 80. Someone born in 1899 could have been born from Jan 1, 1899 to Dec 31, 1899. If that person died in 1980, then that was from Jan 1, 1980 to Dec 31, 1980. The minimum age at death would have been with a birth of Dec 31, 1899 and a death of Jan 1, 1980 which would have been 80 years old (plus one day). The maximum age at death would have been with a birth of Jan 1, 1899 and a death of Dec 31, 1980 which would have been 81 years old (one day short of being 82). Therefore, the person had to be from 80 to 81 years old.

If a person was born “about 1899” and died “about 1980” then what do you do? In Behold’s case, it’s going to assume plus or minus 1 year on every date range. I’ll let you do the math as an exercise if you want to check me, but Behold will report the person would have been from 78 to 83 years old when they died.

There are also calculations of ages involving precise dates with approximate dates. Don’t worry about them. Behold will be reporting those age ranges as accurately as possible.

When events span a birth or the death due to approximations, these need to be reported. If your uncle married between in 1980, then you don’t want the age of your grandfather to be reported as 80 to 81. He died at the age of 80 and never reached 81. Instead Behold will report: age 80 to 7m after death. That information will be very useful to you, because if you find out that your grandfather was still living when they were married, you’ll be able to narrow down their date of their marriage.

I’m excited about the way these dates will be displayed in Behold. Getting them right is very tricky, but doing so will be very useful to everyone who uses Behold.

GEDCOM X: Request For Feedback: March 23, 2012

We’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the things we’re working through right now at GEDCOM X. Just three questions.

 

What are the five most significant deficiencies in GEDCOM 5.5 that you’d like to see addressed in GEDCOM X?

The most significant deficiency:

Not keeping “conclusions” separate from the raw source details. Source details (i.e. the factual parts of the SOURCE_CITATION) must be their own record (or a subrecord of the source)

The second most significant deficiency:

Not having a Place record. Events should be allowed to be associated to places. Place hierarchies should go lower, down to the house, or even a room in a house. A ship should be allowed to be a place (even though it moves around, certain events happen on a ship)

The third most significant deficiency:

Not enough attention was drawn to the powerful ASSO/RELA (Association/Relationship) tags, that are underused and can be made very powerful.

The fourth most significant deficiency:

Good and simple documentation, that will help developers use the standard correctly.

The fifth most significant deficiency:

Good sample files, for developers to use as a guide and test their programs with.

What kind of file format do you prefer?

There are currently two active proposals for the new GEDCOM X file format: a text-editor-friendly MIME multipart (see http://www.gedcomx.org/File-Format.html) or a binary, indexed, zip-based bundle (see http://www.gedcomx.org/File-Format—Alternate-Proposal.html). Which do you prefer and why?

• The MIME-based file (see http://www.gedcomx.org/File-Format.html)
• The zip-based file (see http://www.gedcomx.org/File-Format—Alternate-Proposal.html)

Why?

Objects should not be embedded within the raw data. Early GEDCOM versions tried this and found it was a mistake and subsequently took it out. You have to parse through these huge objects to get to the data. You may get files terabytes of size or larger.

A separate compressed or non-compressed file containing all the objects is better. Event if the file is huge, it need not have to all be read but can be kept on disk and just the parts necessary be accessed quickly when needed via the index and memory-mapping.

Do you have any other feedback?

Current GEDCOM has a lot of great ideas that currently work and work well. Try not to lose these.

Also, try to use the philosophy of “don’t change something unless it absolutely has to be”. Minimizing the logical changes between GEDCOM and GEDCOM X will better allow developers to adopt the new standard.

When choosing between a simple solution and a complex solution, choose the simplest one when it is 99% adequate. Remember, we developers have to program that stuff.

Produce a version of your XML using the GEDCOM syntax. It should be a simple mechanical translation. This will not only validate that the XML works, but will also show exactly where and how current GEDCOM differs with GEDCOM X. In addition, it will allow developers to convert into GEDCOM X in two easy steps: (1) to GEDCOM X in GEDCOM syntax (2) to GEDCOM X in XML. If this is not done for them, the developers will have to do it themselves anyway to see how they must modify their data structures or import/export routines. Each will end up doing it slightly differently and this will introduce errors in input/output of GEDCOM X between programs. So it is better if you do it.

The number one goal should be to ensure that the data will transfer properly between programs. Attempts to include all possible data will result in complexity that will prevent the goal. A proper balance must be achieved. Anything that forces developers to do something unnatural will cause them object and look for a way around it.

Allowing custom tags always results in other programs being unable to properly interpret the meaning of the tag. Programs are starting to use them more and more to export their data that GEDCOM doesn’t handle. This must stop, and some method of being open and extensible without allowing abuse must be implemented - maybe constructs like the TYPE tag, which allow a user-defined data item, rather than allowing user-defined entities, is the way to go.

In the old days, you used to get blank Family Group Sheets from your genealogy society or from a book on genealogy and you’d photocopy as many of them as you’d need.

The Family Group Sheet is supposed to help you organize what you know about each family, and lay it out in a way that is supposed to help you in your genealogy research. Does it do it’s job? Well let’s analyze this and see if it’s the case.

First what we need to know is what information a Family Group Sheet actually contains. This is not precisely definable. In fact, many variations of a Family Group Sheet exist. And every single one of them is limited, because you can only jam so information on a single page. Most contain the same basic information, just laid out differently. Check out the wide variety of Family Group Sheets images on Google for a sampling of how varied they can be.

Here’s an example of one which packs almost as much information as is possible on a single page::

At the top third of the page you’ve got information for the husband and the wife. There’s room to enter dates and places for 5 different events: Birth, Christening, Marriage, Death and Burial. You can list their Places of Residence, Occupation, Church Affiliation, Military Record, Other Spouses, and their Father and Mother. Some of these items must be squeezed into a a very small space where no more than one or two words will fit. There’s also a bit of room at the right for additional information on the husband and the wife.

The bottom two-third’s of the page has room for up to 10 of their children. For each child you can enter dates and places for 4 different events: Birth, Marriage, Death and Burial. You can enter the name of their spouse, and there is a column you can squeeze in additional information, which on the above example was used for the children of each child.

Some Family Group Sheets can even include pictures of the people and be spread across two pages, one for the husband and 5 children, and one for the wife and more children, such as these:

Now wouldn’t we all just love to have a couple of pages like these for 1024 (10 generations) of our own ancestors!

Genealogy programs today can produce Family Groups Sheets. Many of them look similar to the printed forms and include mostly the same information. That is fine and good if you want to print them all out.

Most of the time, you access and edit the information directly in your genealogy program. You normally do this on a Family Group form. They look similar to a Family Group Sheet, but you are restricted even more as to what information is on the form due to the number of pixels that can fit in a window. The various vendors work very hard on this form, because they want them to be usable.

Here is an example of RootsMagic 5’s Family Group form:

And here is Family Tree Maker 2012’s:

Now for the big question. Is the Family Group Sheet and the Family Group form useful in helping you visualize the life of your ancestors?

Well, they definitely do summarize the information about the family well. They show some facts. They show names and dates and places. The raw data appears to be there.

… but something is missing. I just don’t get a sense of what the life of that family was like.

I want to know how the events of a person’s family affected each member of the family. Did a person’s mother die when they were young? How old was the younger sister when her older brother was killed in WWII? Which children were adopted? If the wedding of the child was in a different city, it might wonder how many of their family might have attended. If so, they may have met and other relatives in that city and that’s where the bible information about their grandparents came from. Or maybe they eloped and never saw the family again. There’s lots of clues that can be put together if the information is laid out in a helpful way … but it really isn’t.

That’s enough for now. I’m going to make you wait until my next post when I describe my idea of “Life Events” and how that concept can transform this family information into something useful you can really use.

This will be the 3rd genealogy cruise Unlock the Past has sponsored. Previous cruises were March 2011 and November 2011 so the company has some experience in putting them on.

Their upcoming cruise will be from February 10 to 19, 2013. It leaves from Sydney Australia and has stops in New Caledonia and Fiji before returning to Sydney. It’s on the Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas, which was the largest cruise ship in the world when it was commissioned in 1999. Cost for the conference/cruise is $1499 and they are now open for bookings. From the sound of it, they are expecting maybe 300 to 400 genealogists to attend.

I have given them a list of 24 topics I could talk about. They’ll select a half dozen or so that I’ll then present, plus I may also give some workshops on Behold, GenSoftReviews, or other aspects of genealogy (e.g. GEDCOM, organizing your source material, source-based genealogy, or life-events) that I believe genealogists should learn about or at least be aware of. This particular ship has a 320 seat conference room assigned to our conference that can be divided into 4 rooms, allowing concurrent programming.

There will be excellent presenters there. Some of those included in the list are Jill Ball / Geniaus who I briefly met at RootsTech, Dan Lynch who I would have liked to meet at RootsTech (there were 3,400 people and I couldn’t meet everyone), Jan Gow who I had some wonderful conversations with at RootsTech, who recently won the Queen’s Service Metal for her genealogy work in New Zealand and was also one of the Behold users I met. Then recently announced was Bob Velke, author of the program The Master Genealogist who I’m really looking forward to meeting. In total, there will be about 100 presentations, so this is going to be a significant genealogy event.

I’m looking forward to again seeing some Behold users out there. I know many of you are from Australia, and some live in Sydney. Even if you can’t make the cruise, my wife and I will be spending at least a week prior to or after the cruise in or around Sydney, and I’d love to get together with you. So I’m giving you lots of advance notice (11 months) to make plans.

This site has just been a magical answer booth for me. By now, I have become quite an expert at the parts of my programming language Delphi that I work with. But every so often, I have to figure out how to do new things that I’ve never done, or I run into a bug or a problem that I can’t solve. I first do a simple Google search and 90% of the time I find an answer. When I don’t, I call on my always-on-hand supply of Delphi experts from around the globe that provide me brilliant answers and/or ideas within a day – sometimes within hours or even minutes. It’s the most fantastic resource in the world.

They make it almost an addictive game. They allow you to up-vote questions and answers you consider good, and down-vote questions and answers you consider poor. They give 5 points for a good question, 10 for a good answer, and points for other activities as well. They give you gold, silver and bronze badges when you accomplish specific milestones. Programmers “compete” with their peers for points, badges, and other levels of status.

In so doing, they are helping to answer each others problems, and are producing a searchable database of solutions that has no peer on the Internet. In fact this database gets highly ranked on Google and gets indexed fast. I’ve seen questions on Stack Overflow that were indexed in first place on Google no more than a couple of minutes after they were posted.

The stats of Stack Overflow are quite amazing. There are over 770,000 registered users. These are programmers! There have been over 2,700,000 questions asked in just over 3 years. It gets 5,500,000 page views a day. On Alexa, the site ranks 104 among all websites. Compare that to ancestry.com which ranks 837.

So what have I accomplished there? I’ve asked 125 questions, and accepted 123 answers. I’ve posted 196 answers. The points I’ve accumulated have put me in the top 2.3% of 770,000 users. When I run a query on the StackExchange Data Explorer to find the users in Winnipeg, I see that I have the highest reputation value among 115 programmers.

Most of my questions have the “Delphi” tag, and I’ve asked 85 out of the almost 14,000 Delphi questions at the site. Delphi itself is the 68th most popular topic. The top ones are c# (276,000 questions), java (217,000) and php (200,000).

I have from time-to-time ventured away from my questions to help me with my Behold development, as I also follow questions about APL (an old favorite language of mine from days gone by), computer chess, and anything else dealing with coding and website development (such as Javascript) that I may need from time to time.

So I just wanted to celebrate my 1,000th day and give Stack Overflow and the programming community of the world my thanks for allowing programmers to “socialize” the way we do best – with the only people who really can understand us – other programmers.

The web software used for Stack Overflow is also being made available for any and all other desired Question and Answer sites. Currently there are 84 sites that cover many aspects of Technology, Recreation, Science, Culture, Life Arts, Business and Professional. Over at Area 51, they allow proposals for new sites. Once a sight has enough “commitment” from people who say they will use it, then the site will go beta and voila – a new Q&A site appears.

There is a proposal for a Genealogy Q&A site which I have promoted before. But there’s not been enough promotion of it and more people need to sign up before it will become live. If you might be interested, sign up at the Genealogy proposal page and you’ll help create a genealogist-helps-genealogist resource that will benefit the entire genealogy community. Go here if you’re interested in signing up.