Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Here’s a fun activity. Jarrett Ross, the @GeneaVlogger today posted a video where he ranks Genealogy Websites. He uses an interesting site I’ve never seen before called Tiermaker to do this. The site lets you drag and drop genealogy website logos into tiers that can mean whatever you want. The site ...

Maybe it isn’t for you, but it likely is for me. I’m not talking about using DNA to find close family members, e.g. if you are adopted or don’t know who a grandparent is. That’s still a big thing. And I’m not talking about forensic genealogy used for finding killers and solving cold cases. That is ...

The GEDCOM Standard was first developed almost 40 years ago as a way to store genealogical data and transfer it between programs. It was developed about the same time the first genealogical software programs were developed. The early programs developed a basic structure for genealogy, and the standard ...

My answers might surprise you. Reading Perfect GEDCOM In my previous article Reading GEDCOM – A Guide for Programmers, I outlined a general technique that a programmer of a genealogy program could use to read GEDCOM. Basically, the programmer should read each line in using the generalized definition of a ...

I’m back hard at work on Behold, trying to finish off the many features I’ll be including in Version 1.3 when it’s ready. Some of the changes for Version 1.3 made me take a look again at Behold’s GEDCOM import. Behold currently is a flexible GEDCOM reader. That is, it will accept almost anything that ...

Today, Ancestry sent me an email saying they updated the parent group assignments of my DNA matches: Ancestry calls this technology SideView, and I first wrote about it last December in my article Evaluating Ancestry DNA’s Parental Matches where I compared Ancestry’s assignments to other methods and ...

Everything has its time. And the time for GenSoftReviews is up. GenSoftReviews is a site that was at www.gensoftreviews.com that I ran from 2008 until today, to allow users to come and review their genealogy software. They could rate the software from 1 to 5 stars and leave a textual review with a suggestion ...

Part of the work of genealogists in this digital age is to scan their old physical material. I’ve got many boxes in the closet and basement as well as binders in my shelves that still need to be gone through and digitized. You can only do this one piece at a time, so it’s a manner of picking a project and ...

It’s been a long time since I blogged about the tools I use on my computer to deal with my photos. Looking back, I had these articles: Jan 2006: Windows 98 to Windows XP On Windows 98, I was using JASC Paint Shop Photo Album 5.  When I got a new computer with Windows XP, JASC had been bought ...

I’ve put up more than 1200 blog posts since 2002, but I have never up to now posted a biography about anyone in my family tree. I thought today would be a good day to start. Zalmon Hertzan was a younger brother of my great grandmother Toba Focsaner. He was born on Jan 10, 1873, so today would have been his ...