Genealogy Social Networking Day 18 - MyHeritage


MyHeritage is another family tree website. It actually now owns Geni (that we looked at yesterday). It is one of the major tree based websites for people to do genealogy online. They own the rights to several collections of historical records, which are searchable on their site. Being internationally based, they have many resources for searching outside the US.
On MyHeritage you can create your own family tree 'website'. You can attach photos and stories, and invite others to see your tree. You can then share events with them and collaborate on your genealogy research. You can choose to have your tree be public or private, or just parts of it public (like privatizing more recent generations and living people). There is an option to create family tree charts as well, which you can print from home with all the information already in place for you.
They connect easily with several apps including BillionGraves, Family Tree Builder, and Timebook. Timebook uses the information you put into your family tree and generates a book about your genealogy. Of course, they have their own MyHeritage app too.
When you input a person into your family tree, the site not only searches for historical records that match your information, they also search for other trees that have the same person. They call these 'smart matches'. If the other person has their tree public, you can see all the related information, and find out if you have the same ancestors. It is a fast way to connect with others who are researching the same people as you.
You can contact the owners of the other family trees, which is helpful if you have questions about where they got their information. You can see if they have attached sources or citation to their information right on the ancestors profile page. Being able to see who else may share your relative and be able to contact them is a wonderful thing when researching.

Do you use their Smart Matches to contact other genealogists?


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