Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

#FTDNA2017 – What a great conference! So many people I could talk to at a technical level and so many that I learned from. I averaged less than 5 hours of sleep per night just because the day was so full, every morning was an early wakeup, and I had to watch Saturday Night Live. I left Winnipeg with 5 cm (2 ...

#FTDNA2017 - First up, another breakfast sponsored by FTDNA. This was followed at 8 a.m. by an ISOGG (International Society of Genetic Genealogy) chapter meeting, my first. It was led by Katherine Bodger, the Director and co-founder of the society. ISOGG was founded in 2005 after the first Family Tree DNA ...

The day began with Max Blankfeld and Bennett Greenspan greeting the entire group. After honoring the veterans, and there must have been 50 in the room who stood to loud applause, they provided a bit of information about the conference. There are 240 in attendance. About 50 people, including myself, raised their ...

Location: Houston Texas. About 200 genetic genealogists have gathered for 3 days of talks and mingling and discussion about the state of DNA analysis. It’s very exciting for me to be with and talk to so many experts, each with a slightly different viewpoint and their own specialties in this field. The day ...

Today is my Behold Blog’s 15’th blogiversary.  My first blog post was on Thursday, November 7, 2002. This blog post commemorating my blogiversary is my 1084th. I’m not as prolific a writer as Randy Seaver or James Tanner, but an average of 72 posts a year, more than one a week, isn’t that bad. ...

Last weekend, I enjoyed two webinars by Tim Janzen that were part of MyHeritage’s One-Day Genealogy Seminar with Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Tim gave an introductory talk and an advanced talk on the use of Autosomal DNA Testing. In both talks, Tim showed the well-known and often referred to Speed and ...

I managed to get registered today for The 13th Annual International Conference on Genetic Genealogy held each year by Family Tree DNA and I’ll be going to Houston from November 10 to 12 to attend. This is a tough one to get into (unless you are a speaker) as registration is only open to FTDNA group ...

#cangensummit2017 – The final day at the Great Canadian Genealogy Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia was a half-day with 6 talks in 2 tracks. We all met for a breakfast together, and then I led off repeating my talk from the day before on intro DNA. I had a few less people than the day before since many had ...

#cangensummit2017 – A couple of great days at the Great Canadian Genealogy Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Friday afternoon the started with Jan Raska from Pier 21, of the Canadian Museum of Immigration providing a very interesting keynote for the almost 60 attendees who arrived in time for his talk. ...

I was thinking about my 1 year old grand-nephew this morning, and how he and I would look to be half-sharing about a quarter of our DNA in a chromosome browser. Well that would make my grand-nephew the quarterback of my DNA Football team. His father, my nephew, would be the halfback. My daughters would be ...