Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

GeneJ: I personally think it's better to have an EST or ABT date which shows your assumption about the sort order, rather than having a hidden date that allows you to make an assumption without validating or giving reason for it. If you have the date specified, even if it's a wild estimate, then you ...

Thanks, Dave. That's a great idea. And you're right. I should check for the long names as well.

Illogical or not, it is what GEDCOM says. But probably the best way to do is by strict date order, with a QUAY or something that indicates your surety. Then the date with the highest surety could be used as the "best" birth date when a single date is required. However, there is a difference between your ...

Thanks, Robert. That makes sense and it's quite doable that way. Now I'm thinking that maybe I'll not bother at all with grouping the events in the Source Details section and just go by date there as well. It is expensive (time and memory) for Behold to maintain the sorting both ways, and it seems to me ...

mtibesar: As you have come to realize, I'm of the camp that GEDCOM isn't all that bad. I'd say try to get your GEDCOMs into valid GEDCOM 5.5.1 and keep them that way. You'll be guaranteed that there will at least be a few programs that will be able to read them for the foreseeable future.

mtibesar: That's an interesting question, and I don't have a good answer for you ... because I tend to only notice the bad ones during my testing, and not the good ones. I do know I have notes and comments in my program source for some problems that I've noted, and they include: Ancestral Quest, Brother's ...

My idea here is to enter source reference information that might correspond to a selection out of about 20 fields in a single form, e.g. (book, author, publisher, call number, url, where within source, page, etc.) and the person could easily pick the ones they need to enter for that source. Now of course, I ...

Randy, Unlike one's genealogy research, I do have an idea of where Behold should end up.. Once Behold provides 99% of its intended benefits, which will solve those six bad things plus add multimedia handling (correctly), then development needs to stop. Then what is required is simply maintenance and ...

NPM: Thank you for your comments. I've posted a reply on your site.

Randy: I am trying to de-emphasize the citation, and emphasize that documenting your sources is the important thing. How to formalize it for publishing not only should take a back seat, but it hampers the process of documenting your sources because it makes that more difficult. I have to admit that I ...