A MyHeritage Bonanza

A short time ago, I got an invitation to try MyHeritage.com's soon-to-be-released Record Matching technology. On my very first tries, I was impressed and that isn't very common. I don't usually do software reviews because I like all of the programs and I don't want to appear to hold favorites, but this turns out to be different. There is an obvious initial comparison with Ancestry.com's little green leaf suggestions of records, but the similarity is somewhat superficial. MyHeritage.com has come up with a new service that should impact many genealogical researchers in a way that hasn't happened previously.

As a result of by preview introduction, I wrote a blog post concerning newspaper articles about some of my ancestors. That material, the newspaper articles, came from the suggested searches made by MyHeritage.com. The description provided by MyHeritage.com says it all:

Record Matching utilizes the current global pool of more than four billion records on MyHeritage, including strong collections in the USA, UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada, with more content being added daily for additional countries. Users can receive birth, marriage and divorce documents, gravestone photos, death, burial and census information, military, immigration and other types of records in their Record Matches. More information about the lives of relatives and ancestors can be revealed in Record Matches from the world’s largest historical newspaper collection licensed to MyHeritage (currently about 120 million pages dating back to the 18th century), books and other free text materials. Record Matches also cover the 1930 and 1940 US census records and the content from MyHeritage-owned family history websites, WorldVitalRecords and FamilyLink.

 The only problem I have seen so far is that its popularity may have exceeded their server capacity.