My hobby of Genealogy began fairly abruptly. At my cousin Edith's house in 1974, when my father's aunt came in from Los Angeles, a few of the cousins started piecing together a small chart of how the family was related. The nine Braunstein brothers and sisters (that included my grandfather) were scrawled onto a napkin. That was it! I was hooked.

I went to the library and borrowed books on Genealogy. I talked to my parents and all my uncles and aunts and asked them what they knew. I collected all the information from everyone, read dozens of books about doing and organizing your Genealogy, and tried to find a way of making sense out of everything I had.

At University, I used an online text formatter in a language called SCRIPT. There were no PCs then, and I had to use a terminal to update my files that ran on the University's mainframe and print them at their batch printer. I used SCRIPT to create large documents in a similar manner that people use Word Processors on PCs today. What I found was that SCRIPT had wonderful commands to structure a document and automatically produce a Table of Contents and Index. I proceeded to enter all my Genealogical info into a document, and did so for a friend of mine (who had even a larger tree than I did). The resulting 200 and 400 page documents were a marvel. They were the first incarnation of what I call the genealogical "Everything Report". I used them extensively. In later years, when PCs and commercial genealogy programs became available, I looked for one that had my Everything Report. But there never was anything just like it.

For many years, Genealogy was a part-time special-event hobby. Whenever some important family get-together came along, I would hustle to work on and update that side of my family tree, and make a point of talking to some of the less-often seen relatives about the family. Yes, I also visited archives, libraries, and cemeteries, and sent for vital statistics, and always kept anything of interest - but the "human" things were of most interest to me - the stories, the letters, and the photos and scrapbooks.

In 1988, my father and I made a special trip together to Saskatchewan, and we visited all the places of his childhood - including his two sections of land and the building he grew up in. I videotaped this prized experience.

In 1992, I read that the Genealogical Institute of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada was trying to put together an exhibit of family trees. This intrigued me, so I went to a few meetings. The family tree exhibit never did come to pass, but I did develop a great interest in the activities of the Jewish Historical Society, and was interested in helping develop the Genealogical Institute. In November 1993, I held a workshop on beginning Jewish Genealogy that was attended by about 25 individuals. In June 1994, I accepted the role of Program Chairman for the Genealogical Institute of the JHSWC. In the Fall of 1994, I wrote a series of eight articles on Jewish Genealogy that were printed in the Jewish Post, our local weekly paper. In December 1994, I became a board member of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada. In 1995, I joined the Archives and Acquisitions committee of the JHSWC. I have given many talks on Genealogy to various groups in the city, and for many years gave a talk to the Grade Six students at Shore Elementary School, who each year did a family history project. I started subscribing to Ancestry's "Genealogical Computing" magazine. In December 1993, I joined the National Genealogical Society, primarily to obtain the NGS/CIG digest.

In March 1994, I joined the Muddy Waters Computer Society, a local society that had a computer-genealogy special interest group. The Society's bulletin board also gave me access to several dozen genealogical newsgroups on the Internet and Fidonet, as well as hundreds of genealogical programs and data files. I tried most of the shareware programs that were out there, and quickly learned the good and the bad about each of them. The original program I decided on was Philip Brown's "Family History System" - partly because of its unique "relative report" that was the closest thing I had seen to the Everything Report that I wanted. But, FHS's method of data input was not the easiest to use, and I ultimately purchased Reunion for Windows as my base program.

However, the lack of the concept of an Everything Report was missing from all of the hundreds of genealogical computer and utility programs that were available. They all seemed to concentrate on data input and not data output. So in 1994, to address this problem, I started working on my program: Behold. Over the course of a year, I developed a program that read from a GEDCOM file, and produced an organized, indexed Everything Report.

I gave several talks to the Muddy Waters Computer Society Genealogy SIG. In December 1994, I demo'd Reunion for the group. In March 1995, I demo'd an early Beta test of my program Behold. Each person gave me their GEDCOM in advance, and I produced a report for them from my Beta test. It met with rave reviews! In November 1995, I presented the topic "Genealogical Source Documentation - or - Where the h--- did you get that?" And in March 1996, I showed the group the Genealogical features of America Online. I really enjoyed this group. Unfortunately it disbanded soon after this.

In 1996, I had some very detailed e-mail discussions with Frank Leister and Brad Walter of Leister Productions, producers of Reunion that was then one of the best Genealogy programs available. I had already purchased and did like their program for data input. I was giving them all the details of what I thought was needed in an Genealogy program. I went over with them in detail my ideas of an Everything Report and many other concepts I had. The conversation was excellent, but in the end they went their own way. Their ideas were different.

I spent a good part of 1996 and 1997 devoted to our Cemetery Photography Project, with much of my time spent developing the databases and manually checking each entry at the cemetery. There was a lot of administration involved with this project and our project team was kept very busy.

In January 1997, I put up my web pages. There was a major emphasis on genealogy, but it was also a lot of other stuff of interest to myself and my family. I also maintained pages for the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada and its Genealogical Institute. Over the years, I gained a great deal of expertise in developing and designing web pages, and all manner and forms of using the Internet. The various webpages we have put up have put us in contact with many interesting and important people that we otherwise would not have had the opportunity to converse with.

My Family Research and Unsolved Mysteries was my way of posting my Genealogical research. I don't believe in posting everything you've got, but only post enough so that people who you might be able to share info with can contact you. I think I have an innovative way of presenting this, by presenting my Mysteries. Well, over the years, I've had over 200 people contact me as a result of that page, of which 30 or so were actually related in some way, and 20 of them were previously unknown relatives. Due to these contacts, I have made significant advances on 5 of my 9 lines of ancestry that I am researching. I cannot be more pleased.

I also started My Genealogy Program Links Page as a way to keep track of the hundreds of Genealogical programs that were available. I couldn't find an equivalent list anywhere else, so I made one for myself and thought that the general genealogical community could make use of it as well. I think I was right. That page is one of the most popular pages on my site getting over 120 hits a day. I also made a Jewish Genealogy Links Page, a Jewish Winnipeg Links Page, and a Computer Chess Links Page and added to them whenever I hear of anything new. From time to time I'd link check to remove no-longer existing sites.

In 1997, Leister Productions decided to concentrate on developing their program for the Mac and soon sold their PC rights to Sierra Inc., who renamed the program to be Generations. I became a Beta tester for Generations in the Fall of 1998, and it was an interesting experience to work through a program in detail looking for bugs and pass on my comments in an environment that my comments get responses from the project team leader. It gave me a real idea of the sort of work involved in a commercial venture such as that. They had a team of programmers working full-time trying to put together a product with an amazing range of features, eliminating all possible bugs, in as little time as possible. Phew! Tough job. I didn't even bother suggesting to them most of my concepts for a Genealogy program. The impossibility of going down to the guts of the program and changing it was quite apparent to me.

In late 1998, I became the Chair of the Heritage Acquisitions Committee for the newly formed Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, and became a member of the executive of the JHCWC. By April 1999, I finished the work to put the JHCWC website up which I maintained for them until 2015. And I also worked to add major enhancements to the JHCWC's database program.

From 1999 on, I started working on Behold more diligently. There was a lot to do. From becoming an expert at the programming language Delphi, to learning object-oriented programming, to looking at all sorts of third-party tools for text editing and tree structure and user interface features, to looking at marketing and shareware and registration techniques, to keeping up on what all the other genealogy programs do, to studying all other software for their techniques and user interfaces. Then the programming itself involved taking my old code, rewriting it all in Delphi, redoing the memory management functions, designing and redesigning the user interface, planning, changing plans, implementing features, testing the features, writing down new ideas, researching new ideas, finding bugs and limitations, determining cause of bugs, researching solutions. Let me just say, that if you've never programmed a major system before, and want to make it airtight - it is no small task.

In October 2000, I became a member of the Manitoba Heritage Grants Program Committee. This is a group of volunteers with expertise in various heritage fields, that meet twice a year to evaluate and approve Grant applications to the Provincial Government for Heritage-based projects, including exhibitions, programming, collections management, conservation, publications and research. It is very interesting and encouraging to see the number and scope of projects that are being taken on. My only wish was that the Government would make more money available for such important projects.

In early 2002 I accepted Vice Presidency of the JHCWC, and had a two-year term as President from January 2003 to December 2004. There were a number of major challenges to keep the Centre vibrant and viable, and I worked very hard to try to help build a successful future for our Centre. I accepted my role as Past President in January 2005 and later become a memeber of the Advisory Council. I continue to help out where I can.

On my personal website, my Genealogy Software Links page was up to 355 programs and had over 400,000 hits. But I always wanted that to be something more - an interactive site with users contributing. So in September 2008, I replaced that links page with a site I custom built myself using WordPress that I named Genealogy Software Reviews and I procured the domain gensoftreviews.com for it. That site enables users to add their reviews and ratings for the programs they use. At the end of 2009, I awarded the GenSoftReviews User Choice Awards to the programs that had at least 10 reviews and a rating of 4.0 or more out of 5. That become an annual event. I kept GenSoftReviews running for 15 years and shut it down in 2023 when I and the genealogy community no longer had a great need for it.

In 2010, I joined and contributed many of my ideas to the BetterGEDCOM Project and after that to FamilySearch's GEDCOM X, and Family History Information Standards Organization (FHISO) and to Tamura Jones' GEDCOM 5.5.1 AE and GEDCOM 5.5.5.

In February 2011, I joined Twitter, and started Tweeting to the world, mostly genealogy information. In July 2011, I joined Google Plus, primarily again for genealogy purposes. Over the next 5 years, the genealogical community on Google Plus seemed to be migrating over to Facebook, so I joined Facebook in March 2016 and participate in many genealogy groups there.

On November 24, 2011 (my 55th birthday), I released Version 1.0 of Behold.

I became a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and the Genealogical Speakers Guild. I joined the International Society of Genetic Genealogists (ISOGG). And I've been doing a bit of lecturing on the genealogy circuit, locally and internationally on a host of various topics, from technology to DNA to running a society.

For my programming needs, I got involved with the StackOverflow Question and Answer site for programmers. That led me in 2013 to spearhead the creation of a Question and Answer site for Genealogy & Family History at StackExchange, which I continue to participate in.

From 2012 to 2018, I attended many genealogy conferences in person, gave talks and made many lifelong genealogy friendships. Went to 3 RootsTechs in Salt Lake City, 2 Unlock The Past genealogy cruises, as well as conferences in Kelowna, Halifax, Toronto, Houston, Disney World Florida, and Leiden Netherlands.

In the Spring of 2016, my 93 year old uncle did a DNA test for me, and my journey into DNA analysis began. The work and research required to write Double Match Triangulator (DMT) quickly turned me into an expert in autosomal DNA analysis. DMT won 3rd place at the RootsTech 2017 Innovator Showdown. I've got hundreds of thousands of DNA-cousins on all the major sites: Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, Ancestry DNA, Living DNA, MyHeritage DNA and GEDmatch and have connected my tree to about 50 of them.

On November 24, 2016 (my 60th birthday), I retired from my challenging and enjoyable career of 40 years at Manitoba Hydro. I started as a programmer, became a load forecaster (getting to use the statistics I was trained in), and retired as the Manager of the Forecasting Department..

Following retirement, I now had more time to devote to my genealogy hobby/obsession. I decided on MyHeritage and their Family Tree Builder program as my online and offline tools to maintain my family tree. Their automatic record matches and the vast record set that MyHeritage provides to me makes it an indispensible tool that finds many of the records for me.

The pandemic in 2020 quashed conference-going and my planned trip to the MyHeritage Live conference in Tel Aviv, Israel was cancelled. But it opened up a whole new world of virtual conferences and online presentations, and I've stayed involved and have given a few of those. Genealogy has adapted and now there's almost too much genealogy content online and always something live to watch or participate in.

I continue to spend my non-family hours working on my own genealogy and DNA matches, and developing my Behold and Double Match Triangulator programs to support that work. Since 2017, documents from Romania and the Russian Empire have started becoming available, and they've resulted in many breakthroughs in my own genealogy that were previously impossible. In 2020, I took an online Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) course on researching Russian documents and reading Russian handwriting. I was a featured guest on the WikiTree Challenge and several dozen genealogists worked on my tree for a week - a genealogist's dream. I've been working with my wife's 3rd cousin to see if we can determine if their great-grandparents are truly brothers and also confirm 4 other siblings, using 60 DNA testers, descendants of the 6. I started digitizing my documents, photos and videos, with a goal of spending a half hour or more each night until I'm done.

For the future: still lots to do. My genealogy takes top priority and I'll always work on that first. Behold is going to morph into the program I will need to maintain and preserve my genealogy by allowing me to more easily replicate my work on all the online shared tree sites. I'll continue blogging and tweeting and posting in genealogy groups on Facebook and learning and teaching. It's an exciting time to be a genealogist.

I am still heavily involved in many aspects of Genealogy. Please visit my other pages that have more detail about my specific involvements:

• My Family Research and Unsolved Mysteries is where I am with my own research.
• My Jewish Genealogy Links Page has links to many websites of most use to Jewish genealogists.
• The Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada is the Heritage/Genealogical group that I have worked with.
• Our Cemetery Photography Project was a major project that I was involved in.
• Beginning Genealogy is an article I wrote as a handout for some of my Genealogical talks.
• Behold is the Genealogical computer program I am working on.
• Double Match Triangulator is my program for autosomal DNA analysis.
• My Behold Blog documents my activities in detail.