Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

I have come across a need to check out the SEX tag in GEDCOM. Some of the new DNA features I’m finishing up for the next version of Behold make important use of the sex of the individual. Determining autosomal, X, Y and mitochondrial DNA shares between two individuals is much less accurate when the sex of ...

It’s a new year. I was very happy to complete the tabulation of the GenSoftReviews Users Choice Awards for 2015 and send out the Press Release about it, which so far only James Tanner has posted about it (also here). Usually that takes me a full day to take the results, make up the new badges, and manually ...

Do you an amass everything you can that might be related to your genealogy research? You have books in your library. File cabinets full of articles and clippings. Closets with boxes of unsorted picture albums and scrapbooks with letters and ephemera. Videos still on VHS and super 8. You’ll get to it someday. ...

One thing missing that I am adding to the upcoming version 1.2 release of Behold is an indication of relationships between people. If there is one thing not easy to determine, it is how people are related to the main person (also called the proband). But just as importantly, once you know the relationship, ...

Unless you’re a genealogist that has your head in the sand the past few days, you would have heard the big news from Tuesday that Ancestry will be “retiring” its very popular Family Tree Maker desktop genealogy software. Ancestry has always marketed their software as “the #1 selling family history ...

It may be that the 72 talks on this #utpcruise from New Zealand to Australia are the most sessions possible to attend at a single genealogy conference ever. The cruise is a long one, 18 days, and the sessions are spread out comfortably, with none held during shore leave so everyone can enjoy the ports of call. ...

Windows 10 first released on July 29. It was a staged release, being rolled out in phases to help manage the demand. I had “reserved” my copy early, like millions of others, and was anxiously awaiting it telling me my upgrade was ready. I even tweeted this: So then I waited, and waited, and waited, as ...

My websites, beholdgenealogy.com, lkessler.com, and gensoftreviews.com have been experiencing unfortunate periods of downtime over the past couple of months. Yesterday, I put in my third ticket with Netfirms, my hosting company, about this. My first ticket was Oct 15 and I titled it:  “My sites are ...

This is why I’m switching from using @BlueSnapInc to @FastSpring to process payments for Behold. I started about 10 years ago with what was then Plimus. Plimus was founded in 2001. They were a payment processor that would accept payments for Behold on my behalf. They had a nice interface to produce a buy now ...

I think I’ve got it right this time. Life Events have been cut down to include only the really relevant events that will be important in your research. Children and parent birth, marriage and death events are important. Siblings are as well until the person of interest gets married. Half-family, stepfamily ...