MyHeritage Introduces Record Detective

There are several blog posts so far today about MyHeritage's new Record Detective program introduced this past weekend at the National Genealogical Society (NGS) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Since I did not attend NGS, I have had to rely on reports from others. For an example, see Randy Seaver's thoughtful commentary at "First Look at Record Detective and Record Extraction Features on MyHeritage." Almost all of the other comments by other bloggers are simply reports of the press release.

For my part, I was aware of the pending release of the Record Detective program and made mention of the soon-to-be released program in the presentation I did for MyHeritage at RootsTech 2013. I was very interested in viewing the program and seeing how well it fulfilled expectations.

I am on record as very impressed with the MyHeritage Record Match technology. I am and have been for some time simply unable to keep up with the large number of very accurate suggested records for people in my online family tree. At the moment, I have 2661 Record Matches in 22 historical collections. I have been selectively working through these records as I have time to do so.

Today I did receive the Press Release from MyHeritage about the new addition to their online Family Trees and I began to look at the new features to the program. My first impression was that the I had a lot more work to do. But at the same time, I started to see quite a few false positives. These were easily disposed of, but it looks like it might take some time to get a complete impression of the program.

Randy Seaver discussed a pop-up menu that allowed the record to be saved to the person's record in the family tree. I did not see the pop-up menu, but I did find the records copied to the individual in my family tree. I am guessing that I need to work with the program some more to see how it works in practice. So far, I am finding far more records than I can process.

I have had some feedback from friends and commentators on this blog about their lack of Record Matches. I have found that this is a rather longer process than was anticipated, but, at least in my experience, the records do start to appear. I fully realize that my ancestral family is not ordinary in any sense. They are likely some of the best documented people on the planet.

Like some of the other of bloggers, I will keep working with the new features and get back to you all with comments.