I’ve used a trial version of the online MyHeritage site before. Actually several times. Sometimes software changes for the better and sometimes the worse. Well, today’s test of MyHeritage is a winner. I uploaded a GEDCOM file of 470+ people in my family tree. And then I waited. Waited for the automatic matching processing to occur. WOW! It’s giving me matches using a two column view. On the left I can see a record as I or the client software I used entered it. And on the right column it has perhaps just a text entry. But it also is showing me photos, mini views of records such as census or marriage. And it’s showing me photos or other image files such as an actual marriage record or other original source. These matched records include newspaper articles.
I also note that the record matches show me ‘famous’ people in my tree first. If MyHeritage does some prudent matching, it would know that ALL of the well known people currently in my family tree are only relations by marriage. (And I’ve never even met any of them)…on second thought, I see that the record matches are presorted by the number of matches per individual record. Thus someone who is considered to be famous quite likely has more record matches than other people.
A possible enhancement to this type of record matching could be to let the site owner exclude certain people from matches. Or to have the exclusion time out and need to be renewed at some point. I would definitely do this with several famous people in my tree. I put them in the tree because they are ancestors or blood relatives of cousins of mine. And these cousins don’t have the time to put together their own tree, it’s also kindda fun to see these people in my tree. But once I have the records far enough back for certain people, at the moment anyway, I’m not interested in seeing other matches for these famous people. Oh well…
I can sort record matches by collection or person. And it gives me the option to select the confidence of the match as well as the type of item such as what it calls structured (census, etc), or text (newspaper, yearbooks, etc.) And I am learning some things about the people in my tree just from the snippet of text included in these matches.
In one case I knew about a specific individual in my tree, a relation by marriage. But I had no idea that he had any specific accomplishments until I noticed that there are a lot of matches on his records. When I finally looked up a few I took note of him as a person of interest, and not just another person in my tree.
Wow. Now I can’t get to the actual files that are linked unless I subscribe to MyHeritage. And it’s worth doing so 🙂
Being a techie of sorts, I naturally know there are many software choices for keeping ancestors and relatives in a ‘family tree’. This post will just be about software choices I’ve made and only snippets of the machinations I have thought about and gone through.