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Friday, January 6, 2017

Progress Review from MyHeritage for 2016



MyHeritage.com had a very impressive number of significant and innovative additions to their website during the calendar year 2016 and had a series of other notable events and accomplishments. There is a complete overview of all of the accomplishments on the MyHeritage.com blog. You need to review the video above first shown at RootsTech 2016.

Here is a summary of the some of the events and newly added features.

January 2016: Audio Recordings -- You can add recorded interviews of your relatives and store the interviews for future generations.

February 2016: Family Tree Builder 8.0 -- This was a complete rewrite of the free program. MyHeritage complete rewrote the infrastructure to add support for very large family trees, deliver faster performance, and offer improved data integrity.

February 2016: RootsTech 2016 -- I enjoyed meeting with the MyHeritage.com staff and attending their enjoyable reception and party. They taught numerous classes, including a couple that I taught for them.  The VP of Marketing, Aaron Godfrey, delivered a keynote address outlining MyHeritage’s vision.

During the months of February and March, the employees of MyHeritage volunteered at a local high school giving mentoring talks to disadvantaged youth, visited a local hospital to bring music and cheer to sick children,

April 2016: Book Matching --A revolutionary and unique new technology which automatically finds matches for people in family trees in our vast collection of digitized historical books, bringing new information that you would not have found otherwise. MyHeritage is the only company to offer this kind of technology that can match free-text in books to family trees.

Also in April 2016: Record Detective™ II -- A significant improvement on its predecessor, and adding over 2.2 billion new matches and many more matching documents for each record. Also added in April was the Community-Powered Q and A Hub, a MyHeritage community for their 85 million global registered users to collaborate and to help each other in the true spirit of genealogy. Users may request help to translate records, decipher barely-legible handwriting, identify unknown people in photos and search for long-lost ancestors, as well as lending a helping hand to others with their own requests. In addition, the MyHeritage Mobile App was updated

May 2016: MyHeritage introduced Tribal Quest. I was really impressed and touched by their whole program of helping preserve tribal memories. Here is the introductory video,


June 2016: Sun Chart -- a beautiful, new family tree format.

June also included some emotional reunions including when MyHeritage reunited a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor with her unknown relatives. MyHeritage also revamped their Photos Section. Then at the end of June, MyHeritage launched PedigreeMap™, an innovative free feature that plots births, marriages, and deaths — as well as digital photos and scanned historical photos — from MyHeritage family trees on an interactive map.

September 2016: MyHeritage announced that it had completed over 50% of their goal to digitize every cemetery in Israel. Also, they introduced DNA Matching inviting people to upload their existing DNA results and receive DNA matches to find their relatives. For the time being, they offered and are still offering DNA Matches for free for anyone who has taken a DNA test already and wants to upload the data to MyHeritage. The also release SuperSearch™ Alerts -- an added feature that automatically repeats your previous searches, looking for new results that did not exist at the time of your original search. Instead of coming back to repeat the same searches that you have previously done manually.

November 2016 -- Another update to the MyHeritage Mobile Apps.

At the end of the year, MyHeritage introduced MyHeritage DNA. I have written and will continue to write about this product as I receive my own DNA test.









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