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 smal ..read more

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 ..read more

Will I break it now? Today on Facebook, Alex Krakovsky posted:   Alex Krakovsky  34m · Yes, it’s true. FamilySearch started publishing Jewish metrical records from the Odesa archive. Something that all of us were waiting for many many many years. So far they have published 81 books. 69 of them were never ever available online. 12 books from inventory 5 we published before. I published all the references on Wikisource pages so you can now instantly access them with a blink of an eye. I’m glad we came this far. Here’s the list for your delight. Fond 39 Inventory 2 https://uk.wikisource ..read more

I took my first MyHeritage DNA test at RootsTech 2017 in Salt Lake City. At RootsTech 2024 last March, MyHeritage announced Ethnicity Estimation 2.0 which is to be released this June. There are many good reasons to get their new estimates. The estimates will be a free update for all users who tested on MyHeritage’s Illumina GSA (Global Screening Array) chip (mid 2019 onwards). Unfortunately, my test was from 2017 and used the Illumina OmniExpress Microarray Chip. So I would not get the new ethnicity estimates, and that got me  thinking that their might be other updates in the future that ..read more

Bertha German was born April 1, 1924 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The youngest of 7 children, living together in a small house at 524 Flora Avenue. Toby Braunstein was born on April 7th, 6 days later and 600 km (370 miles) to the west on the farm in the rural municipality of Tullymet, Saskatchewan, Canada. He was the youngest of 4 children. Toby’s father died of Tuberculosis when he was just 7 months old. Toby’s older siblings went to the Jewish Orphanage in Winnipeg, but Toby being still a baby, was allowed to stay with his mother. The matchmakers of the community went to work and just over ..read more

Do you often go to a genealogy site and do a specific search (e.g. surnames and places) for your family records? And then do you go back a few weeks later and search for the same information again because you forgot that you searched for it a few weeks ago? And then do you go back a month later and search again because you wanted to see if there’s anything new thinking you last did that search 6 months ago? One of our big timewasters can be doing the same search over and over. We as genealogists want to be organized and search our favorite indexes in a systematic manner. We don’t want to miss ..read more

One of the reasons why I closed GenSoftReviews last year was because the development of new programs for genealogy had been drying up. There are so many full featured genealogy programs available to choose from that there is hardly any task that at least some of them could do. And with the onset about 10 years ago of genealogy software that could provide you record hints and tree matches automatically, anything less would be a no-go for most people. Treebard So to my surprise, yesterday I learned about a program that I had not heard of previously in a Facebook post from Tamura Jones. The prog ..read more

Over the past several months, I’ve been back to work on the next version of Behold. I’m hoping to release the next major version in the next …  - okay, a programmer knows better than to promise a release date, but let’s say as soon as it’s ready. Keep an eye on Behold’s Future page to follow my progress. The last major release of Behold was Version 1.2.1 which I released in March 2016. Since then, I’ve released 6 additional point versions made up mostly of fixes and small improvements, with the last point release being Version 1.2.7 in September 2021. So it’s been almost 8 years since the ..read more

There’s been a lot of talk the last year or so about the use of Artificial Intelligence for Genealogy. I’ve basically taken a laissez faire wait-and-see attitude towards it. Most of the applications of AI for genealogy are designed to save you time, maybe by drafting out a biography for you or doing image creation, repair or animation. But I’m looking for something that can help me, and help me specifically with regards to one particular task. The task I’m interested in is reading handwriting – not just any handwriting, but the handwriting in Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records from the ..read more

My previous post ran through MyHeritage’s new AI Record Finder tool. Now I’m going to try out the other tool MyHeritage released today. You can find their blog post describing the AI Biographer here: Introducing AI Biographer™: Create a Wikipedia-like biography for any ancestor using AI, enriched with historical context - MyHeritage Blog A Biography by MyHeritage’s Deep Story Tool Before I go into their new tool, I should mention that MyHeritage already had a very innovative AI biography tool. It’s available from the Photos menu and is called DeepStory. I have tried this tool and it produces ..read more