Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

I’ve been a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) for 10 years now, since 2013. I don’t take clients but use my membership to add a bit more credence to my genealogy activities, software development and speaking engagements. Many professional organizations in a variety of fields ...

Happy New Year everyone. GenSoftReviews is the website I created in 2009 to allow users to rate and review their genealogy software. The goal was for the site to be like a Tripadvisor for genealogists to allow them to see what others think of the various programs before they buy, and to allow the software ...

Every year on December 31, I have been summarizing my website page views, family tree counts and DNA matches and putting that on my What’s New page of my lkessler.com website so that I can see how much they’ve changed from the year before. But I’ve never before posted these stats on my blog. This year, I ...

A couple of months ago, Ancestry came out with a new feature called Parental Matches, that shows which parent a DNA match is connected to. My own DNA should be a good test for this. I have 100% endogamy on all my ancestral lines, but my parents are not related according to GEDmatch’s test. Both my parents ...

Yesterday was the final wrapup of the challenge week at WikiTree to try to add as much as possible to the Mark Cuban @mcuban family tree. Mark Cuban is the the American billionaire who co-founded Broadcast.com and owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He is widely known as one of the sharks on the TV ...

I've paid my deposit and my wife Cheryl and I will be going on the Find Your Roots on the River Cruise with Blaine Bettinger and Judy Russell from October 17 to 24, 2024 (yes, almost 2 years away), from Amsterdam through Germany to Basel, Switzerland. This is an opportunity no genealogist should miss. With ...

In an earlier post, I reviewed the Family Statistics that MyHeritage provides. It pointed out that I had some data that wasn’t correct. So at the end of that post, I ran MyHeritage’s Consistency Checker and it found that my tree of 9,050 people has 492 issues and MyHeritage’s desktop software Family Tree ...

Michael Kaplan, a user of my Double Match Triangulator program sent me information about how he was using DMT and also asked a number of questions. I thought this conversation would be very good for other DMT users to read. Michael gave me permission to post the relevant parts of his email to me and to give his ...

MyHeritage has just enhanced its Family Statistics feature. See their blog post from yesterday on this. Being a numbers guy, I really like this sort of information. It it interesting, provides great insights and can point to errors that need correction. I believe MyHeritage has one of the best sets of analytics ...

I was shocked to notice that I hadn’t blogged in over 3 months. I think it’s time to catch up with what’s been going on. The Last 3 Months To be honest, I’ve had another non-genealogy project distracting me and taking some of my genealogy/programming time away. Also, we had a beautiful summer ...