Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

If you’re not a recent user of WikiTree, you might not be familiar with the term CC7. It stands for Connection Count at 7 Degrees.

One “Degree” at WikiTree is defined to be a connection to a parent, sibling, child or spouse. Your connections up to 7 degrees are your shortest path to any other person.

Therefore your CC7 will include your descendants and everyone up to your great-great-great-great-great grandparents, your great-great-great-great grand uncles and aunts, your first cousins 3 times removed, your 2nd cousins twice removed, and your 3rd cousins once removed. These would be all your relatives that are included in your CC7.

But the interesting catch is the inclusion of a spouse as a CC7 connection. This allows spouses of your descendants, spouses of your great-great great grand uncles and aunts, spouses of your first cousins twice removed, spouses of your second cousins once removed and spouses of your third cousins, and your spouses as well.

If the spouse is not already at 7 degrees, then you can include their relatives as well, and even spouses of their relatives and relatives of spouses of their relatives. Whew it gets complicated.

But Why Spouses?

Some genealogy software have a feature that tells you the shortest path between two people. The idea was popularized by the Bacon Number, that any Hollywood actor connects to actor Kevin Bacon through at most 6 degrees of separation, where a connection is a film role. The idea was made possible in genealogy software when computers became sufficiently powerful to be able to go through the billions of possible connections in a short amount of time to find the closest connection.

Well, I don’t have a Bacon number because I’ve never acted in any Hollywood films, but just for fun I can find my WikiTree connection count with Kevin Bacon:

It turns out (and I just discovered this when I did it) that my niece is a seventh cousin twice removed with Kevin Bacon!

I was going to comment about all the husband and wife connections to make this possible, but in this case there was only one, the connection between my nephew and my niece.

Spouses could have been sprinkled throughout that connection, and you could imagine how with a sufficiently large one-world tree like at WikiTree you can connect to almost everybody. It’s just a matter of how many degrees.

But if spouses weren’t included, you’d be limited to only blood relatives.

Wiki Tree 2024 Challenges

What raised my awareness of the CC7 was the current set of Challenges taking place this year at WikiTree. Every few weeks, WikiTree would take a well-known genealogist, and WikiTree members would work together to expand that genealogist’s CC7 on WikiTree.

So far this year the subject genealogists have been:

• Meli Alexander  (CC7 increased from 1378 to 2227)
• Lianne Kruger  (564 to 1368)
• Randy Seaver  (1621 to 2457)
• Judy Muhn  (795 to 1498)
• David Allen Lambert  (2290 to 3338)
• Ellen Thompson-Jennings (1170 to 1834)
• Thomas MacEntee (1039 to 1524)
• Lisa Louise Cooke (935 to 1360)
• Jill Ball (2154 to 3022)
• Melanie McComb  (1290 to 1851)
• Jarrett Ross (547 to 1498)

So for a full week, about 30 enthusiastic WikiTree volunteers managed to add about 800 CC7 profiles for each genealogist, while at the same time adding sources and breaking a few of their brick walls

I was interested in both Melanie’s and Jarrett’s Jewish connections, so I become a volunteer in both their weeks and helped add to their profiles and shared knowledge and learned a lot myself on the group’s challenge Discord channel. You can see Melanie’s “Final Reveal” on YouTube where I was one of the panelists. And you can watch Jarrett’s “Final Reveal” which will take place on October 3.

The Importance of CC7

Many people likely have heard of the FAN Principle, which is often promoted by Elizabeth Shown Mills and others.  FAN stands for Friends, Associates and Neighbors, and the idea is that in order to learn more about your relatives, you will find clues and records if you look a their FAN Club.

Like many other genealogists, I concentrate primarily on my own relatives (through blood or adoption) and will include their spouses and stepfamily. But I do stop there and don’t go into each of my relatives’ spouses families – their ancestors, siblings, cousins, etc.

Well a CC7 though marriage is very similar to studying a FAN club. Many of these cousins through marriage lived in the same places, associated with, and may hold clues that lead to records of your direct relatives. At a limit of 7 degrees, we usually are staying close enough to the relative that these people are still quite relevant. In addition, any family trees that include some of these relatives through marriage will overlap with your tree and include that relative’s descendants and possibly have better info on them than you have.

What is also fun that you can do with a CC7 at WikiTree is find the notable people you are connected to. During Jarrett’s challenge, we found he was directly related within 7 degrees to four “Notables” and was a CC7 to another 16 relatives through marriage (including Cary Grant!).

I still don’t plan to add relatives through marriage to my primary tree on MyHeritage.  But I do plan to use WikiTree to keep track of my CC7s for me. My CC7 count at WikiTree is currently only 756 and I have no people marked “Notable” yet among them. I plan to spend a bit of time each week to expand my CC7 connections there. It really is interesting and sometimes helpful as well to look at your relatives’ relatives.

In doing so, I may find some CC7s that are already in the main tree. Connecting them will shorten some of my paths to the notables and some might land within 7 degrees. Maybe I can even reduce my connection to Kevin Bacon down from 20.

MyHeritage is the site where I maintain my family tree information. I have one main tree for my family and my wife’s family along with a place-to-place study of the people who left the town of Mezhirichi in the Russian Empire in the early 1900’s to come to Winnipeg and their families. This tree now has 12,111 people in it.

I also have 6 other trees, for my brother-in-law (my wife’s sister’s husband), my niece, my wife’s stepfather, a good friend, a family tree of Mark Cuban from when I worked on him during a WikiTree challenge, and a Bible family tree. These other trees are all relatively small ranging from 190 to 804 people. My niece and friend’s trees could be much larger since they have some lines going back to the 1500s, but I’ve limited those trees to ancestors-only after the first 3 generations to avoid going crazy.

An Opportunity

For my other brother-in-law (my sister’s husband), I have his mother’s side included in my place-to-place study. But his father’s side has been mostly a mystery and there’s no living relatives that he knew of on his father’s side.

He told me his father Joseph Shpiegel (later Spiegel) came from Russia with his father’s uncle Alex Shpiegel. My brother-in-law remembers when he was young visiting his great-uncle at the old folks home in Winnipeg. Alex passed away in 1961 and is buried in a cemetery near Winnipeg.

I knew my brother-in-law’s father had 3 brothers and 2 sisters that went by the surname Kogenman, son of Oiser Kogenman. One older brother left Russia and went to St. Louis and married and had a daughter who died unmarried and childless. So that branch is gone. And we don’t know what happened to the other 4 siblings who stayed in Russia (now Ukraine).

So just for fun, I thought I’d try to find out more about this Alex Shpiegel.

Another Family Researcher

The first place I went was to my brother-in-law’s niece’s Ancestry site to see if she had anything I didn’t.  She had three important facts: 

1. The family was from the town of Pishchanka in Podolia.
2. Oiser Kogenman’s wife was Rifka Prosterman.
3. Joseph’s passenger record in 1924 which stated that he travelled across the ocean alone (at 14 years old!!!) to stay with his uncle Alex Shpiegel in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Researching Alex Shpiegel in Regina

I then looked to see what I could find about Alex’s life in Saskatchewan. I couldn’t find much, but what I found had a big surprise.

The 1916 Canadian Census shows Alex living on Ottawa Street in Regina, age 28, a junk peddler, immigrated from Russia in 1913.

It shows him having a wife, age 28, immigrated from Russia in 1914. Nobody ever knew that Alex was ever married!!

The name is indexed as “Lisa” but is hard to read and is likely something else, since Lisa is not a Jewish name given to Russian girls:

I was able to find her Passenger record:

This lists her name as “Leie”, i.e. Leah, which makes more sense. It also says she was married, so she and Alex must have got married in Russia. Alex came first to find a place and get a job and then sent for Leah to join him the next year.  Either Alex or Leah could be Joseph’s blood relative.

After that, I found the 1926 Canadian Census for Alex Shpiegel:   Item: Alex Spiegel - Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)
This record lists his wife as Helen, which may be the English name she chose.  I searched around to see if I could find a death record or a headstone for a Leah/Helen Shpiegel/Spiegel, but I was unable to find anything. She just vanished after 1930.

Joseph lived with them from the age of 14 for about 10 years and even took the Shpiegel surname. But he never mentioned to his children that Alex had a wife. Maybe she and Alex split and she remarried and took on a new surname, which might be why I can’t find her.

Prosterman in Regina

While searching information about Alex Shpiegel and Leah/Helen in Regina, I also came across some family trees on MyHeritage of Prosterman in Regina.

Sam Prosterman and his wife Miriam and their 8 children came to Regina in 1904 from Pishchanka. Sam’s sister Faigeh Prosterman and her husband Nusan Finkelstein and their 10 children came to Regina in 1913 from Pishchanka.

Everything is starting to click. Joseph’s mother was Rifka Prosterman. She is not listed as one of the 18 children of Sam and Faigeh. And Leah/Helen and Alex Shpiegel are not in the trees either. Could they somehow be related.

Then I came across this newspaper article from 1928:

This was a 1928 Wedding Anniversary from the Prosterman family where much of the Regina Prosterman and Finkelstein families were invited. And who just happens to be invited to this event? None other than “Mr. and Mrs. Alex Spiegel”.

So how are they related?

Russian Records

After a bit of checking on JewishGen for a Leah Prosterman, I found just one record  and it was a birth record in the correct year in the correct place Podolia. The town of Balta is only 25 km from Pishchanka. I would think this is quite likely her.

Fun, fun, fun!

Unfortunately, it does not give Leah’s father’s name. But since Alex was known to be Joseph’s uncle, it makes sense that Leah Prosterman was Rifka Prosterman’s sister. Their father likely was a brother to Sam Prosterman and Faigeh Finkelstein.

Building the Tree on MyHeritage

With the assumption in hand that Sam, Faigeh and “Unknown male” Prosterman were 3 siblings, I moved on to the task of building their family tree.

I started with Joseph, added his parents Oiser Konegman and Rifka Posterman and Oiser’s siblings. I connected Leah/Helen as a sister to Rifka. Added their unknown father and connected him as a sibling to Sam and Faigeh.

Then I let MyHeritage’s magic do its work, and it came up with 542 record Matches from 33 sources, and 1,132 Smart Matches from 62 family trees. Those trees included 6 that were created by direct descendants of Sam or Faigah.

So now it was time to build a “Quick and Dirty” tree from all that information. I methodically went through all the MyHeritage hints, using newspaper articles and online obituaries of those who died within the past 25 years along with living people records for the USA to add some confirmation that the family trees were mostly correct.

About 4 days and 40 hours of reviewing matches later, I had my own tree assembled with 538 people.

My brother-in-law now has several hundred living relatives on his father’s side, mostly at the 3rd cousin level, that he previously never knew of.

Today, I released a new version of Behold. This has been a long time coming as I’ve been working on it off and on for the past number of years. I gave my last status report in February that had some thoughts as to where I’m taking Behold.

I wasn’t planning on releasing Version 2.0 of Behold until it was ready, and I’m still at least a few months away from that. But yesterday, a new user downloaded and tried Behold and asked me if the links in Behold’s exported html and rtf files were supposed to work. Yes, of course they were, but that was a known bug to me in the most recent Version 1.2.7. I already had the fix in my development version. Rather than fixing the bugs and releasing Version 1.2.8, I thought:

I’ll never get it perfect so I might as well release it.

Perfectionism is a leading cause of procrastination.

They say software developers should release early and release often.

So what the heck. This developmental version has been running smoothly for me for the past few months. I have been fixing any bugs I find as I encounter them. And there are enough changes and improvements … even though it’s not “finished” … that I thought it might be best to release it. 

Below I go through some of what’s changed in the new 1.99 beta version.

New Internal Data Structures

This is something you won’t see. But internally in Behold, I’ve removed all my custom data structures (including my wonderful B* tree that was incredibly fast). I’ve replaced them all with standard lookup tables, and changed all the record keys from text strings to integers. I started this when I was still thinking that Behold would become a full fledged editor knowing that this would allow a relatively easy switch to using a database so that the data could be more efficiently saved to a file and retrieved again.

Now that editing is no longer in my future plans, this still was a good move as it  made my structures relational and simplified their use internally. Behold’s data structures now should be able to handle any and all genealogy data in a generalized way.

Updated Windows Styling

Windows 10 has updated its standard dialogs such as the “File Open” and “File Save” which are much more useful than before. Behold now uses new Windows dialogs whenever possible.

GEDCOM Validation

Behold has always included a lot of checks that the GEDCOM being input is correct. This version adds comprehensive syntax checking to match the GEDCOM 5.5.1 specifications exactly (except for a few known errors in the spec). This will help indicate how precise the GEDCOM is and tell you exactly what is wrong with it.

Selection of People to Include

Previous versions allowed you to select which people to build the families around and whether you wanted all their relatives through marriage and whether you wanted everyone else as well. In addition to that, you can now filter out all living people, and select the number of generations of ancestors and descendants to include from each starting person. The Index of Names, Place Details, Source Details and all other information will be shown if they refer any of the people included.

Menu and Toolbar Items Updated

New functionality such as the selection of people and finding the next or previous data problem are available via the menu or toolbar or shortcuts.

GEDCOM Export

In the 1.99 beta Version, this is a first version of GEDCOM export. There is still a bit of refinement needed and testing I need to do before trusting it completely, and it will be the next thing I work on in the next few weeks. It is being designed to either:

1. Export “verbatum” GEDCOM,  i.e. with custom tags and structures known only to the program that originally created that GEDCOM,
   or
2. Export to “standard” GEDCOM, i.e. GEDCOM 5.5.1 following the GEDCOM 5.5.5 recommendations so that all the data will be accepted by almost every GEDCOM reading program.

The GEDCOM that will be exported will correspond to what Behold displays. You can filter the people you want, select fact types to include, etc.

Once I’ve finalized the export procedure (likely in Version 1.99.1), I’ll write a full blog post all about exporting GEDCOM.

Relationships

Every person will have ALL their relationships to each of the selected family people displayed for you. The current beta includes this now, but it is nowhere near final. It will be the next thing worked on after GEDCOM Export is completed.

Ancestral Surnames and Places

You’ll see placeholders for two new sections:

1. Ancestors by Surnames
2. Ancestral Place Details

I’m creating these unique reports because I need them for my own research. I’m sure many of you will find them to be useful references as well.

Lots Of Improvements and Fixes

Small but important things, such as slightly increasing the font size of titles and using a bold font for all surnames. And lots of tweaks to the display the data better.

For a complete list, see: Behold Version History

To see what’s coming by Version 2.0, including some DNA features that no other program has, see: Behold Future Plans

Note that the Help file and website will not be updated to reflect the new features once all the functionality for Version 2.0 is included.

So give it a try if you want:  Behold Download Page (beholdgenealogy.com)