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

You may not have heard of this yet, but MyHeritage has just launched their new AI Record Finder. I got the email from them about it earlier today. Rather than me describe it, you can read about it on MyHeritage’s blog post:  Introducing AI Record Finder™, the World’s First AI Chat-Based Search Engine for Historical Records - MyHeritage Blog I’ve not personally gone much into the AI (Artificial Intelligence) aspect of genealogy. I am a member of the Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence Facebook group led by Blaine Bettinger, but I haven’t yet tried ChatGPT or any other AI tools with respe ..read more

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 includes the category “genealogy sites” which has 52 pre-defined logos of some of most popular websites for genealogy. Jarrett in his 3 hour video goes through the sites one by one and explains how he uses each site and decides where he plans to put them. My Own Ranking Jarrett debated how he wante ..read more

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 still going on in the background to the dismay of many. And there are still many medical reasons why a person might want to do Whole Genome Testing. I’m talking about my personal use of the DNA information that DNA companies and third parties are providing me. DNA for Genealogy I started my use of D ..read more

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 reflected that. The standard was updated many times mostly to ease its implementation and to transfer additional types of data, but the basic record structure has never really changed. The standard that is common use now is GEDCOM 5.5.1. It was drafted in 1999 and finalized without changes in 201 ..read more