Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

… and including deceased people.

This is something you want your online genealogy programs to do for you. Privacy of living people is important, so you want living people to be excluded.

MyHeritage displays living people like this, showing all the people with their birth surname and a given name of “<Private>”:

Geni is similar, but shows the married surname of the wife rather than her birth surname:

Ancestry does not give you surnames, but does include all the people and shows you the sex of each person:

FamilySearch does not show living people at all (unless you are the person who entered the information ). I like this best. If you want to keep living people private, then don’t show them or include them at all.

Specifying a Person as Living

Most online systems allow you to specify if a person is living or deceased.

At MyHeritage:

At Ancestry:

This is good. Every person has to have this designation set. And you can only specify the death information if you’ve marked the person as deceased.

There are two problems with this.

1. The status may be entered incorrectly and a living person is marked as deceased.
2. A living person eventually dies, and it could be years before it is even realized that the person has passed.

The online programs do try to mitigate this.

At Ancestry, if the status is not entered and there is no death information but there is a birth date, then if the age is less than 100, the person is treated as living. See: Living People in Family Trees (ancestry.com)

FamilySearch does something similar.checking for a birth 110 years ago, marriage 95 years ago, or a child born 95 years ago. See: How Family Tree decides if a person is living or dead • FamilySearch

Privacy in Desktop Software

For the most part, genealogy desktop software is for private use. Since others will not often be looking at your desktop tree, privatizing living people is not as important.

However, if you export your database to GEDCOM in order to load it to an online tree or send it to someone, then you’ll want to exclude your living people and their associated sources and media from the GEDCOM file.

Most programs cannot do that. If it’s going to an online tree, you’ll have to rely on the online tree’s privacy settings to hide your living people for you.

What makes this difficult is that most desktop programs don’t make you specify if each person is living or deceased. In a way, that is good, because we often do not know if a person is still living or not. In fact we may leave out birth and death dates completely for deceased people if we don’t know the dates they lived. We might just enter their name and sex if that is all we know. but we don’t want them to be treated as living if no death date was listed. So what do we do?

Filtering Living People

The new version of Behold I am working on will include a number of ways to filter the people you want to display. One of the filters will be to exclude living people.

The new version of Behold will also include GEDCOM export. It will export just the people and information that has not been filtered out.

It took me a few days to come up with the algorithm to do this, but I finally figured out something that should work very well. It goes like this:

1. For each person in the tree with a birthdate::
2. If the person was born at least 100 years ago, then:
• Mark the person as deceased
• Go through the person’s ancestors and mark them all as deceased as well. (Can stop at ancestors with birthdates, since they will get done).

Then upon export, only people with death information or with a birthdate will be included, along with the sources and media for only these people. If there is no death date for a person, then the following GEDCOM line will be included to indicate that this person is deceased.

1 DEAT Y

Most programs reading that GEDCOM line will recognize it, and mark the person as deceased.

One more thing:  If you have a person who died, but one or both parents are still alive, then I feel the child should remain private. It is not fair to the living parent(s) to give information about their deceased child. Many programs display the information about the child, but Behold will not.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’ll find the filtering of living people to be a useful feature in the next version of Behold. To follow my progress as I finish up Version 2.0, check out my Behold Future Plans webpage.

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 4 years later, Toby’s mother married Louis Kessler who was a recent widower himself. She and Toby moved 240 km (150 miles) south to Louis’ farm in the Sonnenfeld,Colony in Saskatchewan and she was able to take Toby’s older sister out of the orphanage to be with them.

Bertha’s mother died when when Bertha was just 9 years old. Her older sisters and brothers helped her father raise her.

When she was in grade 1, Bertha’s sister saw a “Baby Peggy” in a movie and liked the name and started calling by the name of “Peggy”, and somehow Peggy became the name everyone called her and the name she called herself.

Toby and his sister went to a one-room schoolhouse about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) away in the nearby town of Ratcliffe, Saskatchewan . Their surname at school was Kessler.

Life in a small 6 room home in the city for a single father and 7 children was not easy. But the children went to school and the older ones soon married. Peggy finished high school and got a job as a secretary after becoming proficient at typing 90 words per minute.

Life on the farm in a small 4 room home for Toby’s family of 4 was not not easy. Prairie winters were brutal. In 1932, Toby’s stepfather was disabled by a sleigh accident and Toby had to take over running the farm. They had 320 acres with horses, cows, chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs and cats and also planted crops and grew vegetables. Toby loved doing the farm work, and he would hitch two horses to the sleigh to take him and his sister to school on school days. His brothers, who were still being schooled at the orphanage in Winnipeg, visited Toby on the farm several times.

Above: Toby (back row, center) with his brothers, sister and mother at his farmhouse in 1941.

Toby’s stepfather passed away in 1940, when Toby was 16. He, his mother and his sister stayed on the farm during the war years. When the war ended, they looked for a better life in the big city of Winnipeg. There, Toby started work as a taxi driver.

Toby courted Peggy, picking her up at her house in his taxi. Peggy was worried that Toby was several years younger than him, but was relieved to find out he was only 6 days younger. They married in 1950 in Winnipeg. Toby legally changed his surname from Braunstein to Kessler prior to getting married. Peggy didn’t legally change her given name, but signed her name as Peggy Bertha Kessler.

Above: Toby and Peggy on the steps of their first home at 408 Rupertsland Avenue in Winnipeg in 1950

They had a daughter Esther in 1951 named after Peggy’s mother, and a son Louis (me) in 1956 named after Toby’s stepfather.

The next year they purchased a newly built 1040 square foot three bedroom bungalow at 375 Perth Avenue which was at the time at the edge of the city for about $9,000.

Toby took a real estate course and became a real estate broker and started his own company which he called T. Kessler Realty. He built an office in the basement of their home on Perth Ave and worked from their home. Over a 38 year career, mostly on his own, he gave personalized service and helped hundreds of people in the neighborhood sell or purchase a home.

Peggy was a stay-at-home mom who helped Toby with the paperwork for his business and for a time worked from the house as an insurance agent.

Toby and Peggy both had lots of family – aunts, uncles and cousins –living in Winnipeg. Peggy loved to have family over and would entertain any and all who would come by with pastry and drink ready at a moments notice.

They loved and enjoyed their children and gave them life experiences taking them everywhere, from playgrounds to parks to beaches and summer cottages, to the zoo, the planetarium, the museum, to movies, to supermarkets and shopping malls, on horseback rides and car trips to the Rockies and Vancouver.

To instill independence into their children, they made sure that by high school their children took an after school job at the library a block away. And Toby set up a youth organization so that they’d meet others and maybe meet their future spouse.

They were successful in their efforts and both children married giving their parents four grandchildren for them to spoil.

Toby and Peggy sold the house and moved into an apartment. They had their children and grandchildren over every Sunday for dinner together.

Toby had an angina attack in his 40’s and took up jogging years before jogging because a thing. Ten years later, they joined the newly built Reh-Fit Centre where both Toby and Peggy would go together to do their exercises three times a week.

Once preparing the Sunday dinners became too difficult for Peggy, the family switched to eating out on Sundays, testing out dozens of different family restaurants in the city. Toby and Peggy always enjoyed attending their grandchildren’s events, from dancing to school plays to graduations.

Peggy Kessler (1924 – 2008) and Toby Kessler (1924 – 2014)

In 2007, Peggy was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. She worked her hardest to fight it but succumbed 6 months later at the age of 84 on her youngest granddaughter’s 16th birthday.

Toby then moved to a retirement home. After 3 years on his own, he had a heart attack and was relocated to the nursing home where his sister and one of his brothers were living. He spent a happy last 3 years there, enjoying visits at least 3 times a week from his children, before passing away on the day that would have been his 64th wedding anniversary, just short of his 90th birthday.

Thank you Mom and Dad for the life you instilled upon me and your daughter and your grandchildren. We’ll always love and remember you.

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 anything and we want to be efficient at it.

Sure, every so often we’ll go off on a wild goose chase searching down some rabbit holes, and that’s okay. We need a bit of fun, and sometimes that can result in a gem or two. But we don’t want random searching to be our raison d’être.

Everyone has their own favorite search sites, be it MyHeritage, Ancestry, FamilySearch, BillionGraves, Newspaper sites, and hundreds of others. Each has a similar but slightly different search tool.

A few months ago, JewishGen , one of the most useful resources for my own genealogy research, started adding a lot of indexed records from the towns in the Ukraine that my ancestors are from. I knew I needed to check what they had and compare those with the records I acquired over the past few years from my Ukraine researcher Boris Makalsky to see what’s new that I don’t have.

I wanted to do this in a rigorous manner and a way that I’d know exactly what I searched for and also what it was I found that was relevant to my family.

Searching on JewishGen

I’ve been using JewishGen for many years. They have a very nice unified search that provides results from all of their many database indexes. A simple version of their search is available on their home page and looks like this:

The first two dropdown boxes allow you to choose between Surname, GivenName, Town or Any Field. Lara Diamond wrote an article “Tips to Find Relatives on JewishGen” explaining the best ways to use the JewishGen search.

For me, I found my best way was to use the simple search and search for a combination of my ancestral surname and the town they lived in. For example, searching for the surname “Dubovy” in the town of “Zhitomir”, JewishGen returns  the result below. (Click on any image for a larger version).

This search returns 99 matches from 9 databases on JewishGen plus 64 records on Yad Vashem that aren’t included in the 99 number. Clicking on the “List xxx records” buttons on the right will bring up the search results for each database. e.g. the 26 results from the Marriage Group 3 database start off like this:

Keeping Track, Avoiding Re-Searching

I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of my searches. Each column would be the surname and town I would search followed by the date I last did this search and the number of search results JewishGen said it found.

On the left, I would list each of the databases that JewishGen had results for me in my searches.

The intersecting squares would have the number of search results for the search listed in the column and the database in the row. The cells with relevant results would be white and the others would be yellow.

The total number of records found (less Yad Vashem) would be summed in row 5 and I could easily compare it with the number in row 4 which was the total that the search said there were.

The last time I had done this Dubovy Zhitomir search as you can see from the spreadsheet was March 23 or which was just 4 days ago. Normally, I wouldn’t do a search 4 days after I previously did it since results usually would be the same, and the total is still 99.

But I may decide to do re-do a search that I hadn’t done in a few months if I was working on that surname or place. Let’s say the total matches found increased by 10. Then I could compare the JewishGen results for each database with my spreadsheet, and update any counts that changed, and in doing so, I’ll know  which databases have new results for me to look at.

This spreadsheet now has 69 rows listing different databases and 32 columns of searches that I do. I would never be able to remember what I’ve done or what I still have to do without this spreadsheet.

How about Research Logs?

A lot of people love research logs, but I’ve never really been a fan. They are a document organized by time, rather than by task.

Writing each search I do and the results I get into a time-organized research log would allow me to find the last time I did a specific search such as Dubovy in Zhitomir, but it does not give me a good handle on where I stand on all my searches nor make it easy to see what searches I’ve done and have yet to do.

Conversely, I do like timelines and organizing certain materials by date, such as my picture collection or events for each person.

For keeping track of searches, I feel my spreadsheet is a much better tool.

Cataloguing the Search Results

And then I want to do the analysis of each search result, and determine which ones are relevant and give me information about my family. For that I created a set of spreadsheets, one for each type of record. e.g. Birth, Marriage, Death, Revision Lists (which are Russian censuses), etc.

Here’s part of a page from my JewishGen Marriage spreadsheet:

The tabs at the bottom are spreadsheet pages, one for each surname.

The page is divided into sections organized alphabetically by town. Line 48 is where the 26 results for Dubovy in Zhitomir start.

Columns I through X and even further, in this case up to column AJ, contain all the fields from the search results page.

I add in 3 other important columns:

• Column F tells me if that is a record that my researcher had found for me.
• Column D tells me if the person is in my MyHeritage tree and if so, I include a link to my tree so that I can instantly access him.
• Column B is a source citation made from a formula that pulls out information from the other fields.

I love that last item. The equation in cell B51 looks like this:

="JewishGen, "&H51& ", "&U51&" of "&J51&" "&I51&" and "&L51&" "&K51&" "&AE51&" in "&AD51

and the resulting citation is:

Conclusion