Section 2 - The Information Area

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The information is divided into up to three parts, using a blank line as a separator.

 

If the person does not have a spouse/partner, or if there is no detail about the person together with their spouse/partner, then that part is not shown.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

Within the details for the person and spouse/partner together, there will be links to their children.

 

Similarly in the details for each person, there are links to that person's parent (but in the above example, this is the initial ancestor, so the parents are not known), as well as other spouses/partners that person may have.

 

These direct links make it easy to navigate to the children, parents, or other spouse/partner, who may not necessarily be close by in the report. The numbering for the person is a quick indication as to how far away physically in the report that person may be, and allows you to find them easily in a printout.

 

 

Source references are show between square brackets: "[" and "]".

 

Behold numbers your sources for you to make it easy to find them in the Source Details section. (e.g. S5) and then adds a sequential number to represent the specific information in that source (e.g. the -1). Together, the S5-1 is a source reference and it is also in blue meaning it is a hyperlink to take you to that source in the Source Details section.

 

The most relevant information about the source follows to let you know at a glance what the source actually is. This is made of of the source description combined with the specific information description. You can toggle the viewing of this information about the source on or off by selecting from the menu: View -> Short or Long References clicking on its associated toolbar icon that is a set of ellipses within square brackets (which makes you think of "more information") and looks like this:
The above source reference in short form look like this:

Birth: Jan 1872. [S5-1]

 

 

Complex organization of information is possible. Information can contain a description, a date, a place, sources, objects, a title, a type and much more. Subinformation can even contain sub-subinformation. Don't worry about this. Behold handles it quite automatically and presents it in the best layout possible. One item of information is shown one one line and if that line is too long, subsequent lines are indented to show they are part of the same item.

 

 

Often there are links to pictures, sound or video files, text documents, PDF files, or any other type of computer file. These are called "Objects" and the location of the file will be shown in blue and hyperlinked. When you click on it, the program associated with the file suffix will start and the named file will be loaded into the program. e.g. in this case, the filename ends in ".jpg" which is a picture file. If .jpg files on your computer normally open in Microsoft Paint, then clicking on the filename will open Microsoft Paint and load the picture into that program.

 

In Windows, If you want to change the default program that opens when you click on it, do this:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Events or facts may have types that describe them. In this example, the fact is "Occupation" and the type of occupation is "Packer".

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

This particular sample file include with Behold is somewhat inconsistent. You'll find some entries such as: Boston, Suffolk, MA, 50 West Third Street. Here, the street address follows the state, but if it were correct, the address would be the first jurisdiction, before the city "Boston".

 

 

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

 

 

Each person and their spouse/partner except for the main ancestor has a number to the left of them.

 

 

Each generation is indented another level. On the 15th level of generations, the indenting is moved back 10 levels and a "+15" is placed on the separator to indicate that 15 generations are added to the level. This is repeated every 10 generations deeper, so "+25", "+35",... etc. will prefix deeper generations.

 

The number to the left is the number of the child to their first-listed parent (father or mother). Simply stated, the first child is 1, the second is 2, etc.

 

 

The spouse is prefixed by an "m." to indicate "married" or "mated" (where a mate would be a partner not legally married, but may be the other physical or legal parent of their child/children or may have some other close association).

 

There are other abbreviations as well:

 

"r." indicates a remarriage or re-mate of someone. The person is listed again, and they have a cross reference back to their first listing. The spouse/partner of this person would then be prefixed by "m2." A third marriage of someone would again have the "r." and their spouse/partner would be "m3.".

 

When a spouse/partner remarries, they are listed again with the prefix: "s.". Their spouse/partner will be listed with the prefix "sm.".

 

You can change the abbreviations that are used for each of these on the Organize Report Page.

 

 

Whenever a person is repeated, their information is not listed again. Instead, a link back to the first entry for that person is given on a reference to "see above".

 

People can be repeated when they remarry, or if the arey connected to two or more different families on different ancestral lines.

 

 

This simply means that every person's descendants are listed before the next sibling of that person is listed.