Relative Found through MyHeritage.com

We had an interesting experience this past week or so at the Mesa FamilySearch Library. My wife was helping a patron who came to the United States from Denmark over 50 years ago. She had lost contact with her family remaining in Denmark but had just recently started putting her family tree on MyHeritage.com. She came into the Library for help with MyHeritage.com and since my wife has used the program for some time, she was asked to help her. My wife helped her find and enter some relatives but the patron was so new to computers and did not have one of her own, she had limited access to her email address. In working with MyHeritage.com, the patron saw a SmartMatch for a cousin who still lived in Denmark. Since she did not have access to a computer, my wife volunteered to see if she could contact the cousin. When she got home, she sent the cousin an email and within a day or two received an excited response from the cousin in Denmark.

After a few days, my wife was able to make contact with the patron again and give her the response from the cousin in Denmark. Within a short time afterwards, the patron and the cousin were reunited online. They were both excited about the contact after more than fifty years' absence from Denmark.

This type of response is not something we see every day, but I am certain, with the vast number of people in Europe and the rest of the world on MyHeritage.com and the ability to translate the messages on Google Translate, many people are probably reacquainting themselves with there relatives in the "Old Country" every day. Just thought I would pass this along as a success story for MyHeritage.com.

If you have been reading my blog posts, you very well know my attitude about online family trees. But this is really a dramatic example of how the family trees, despite any of their inherent limitations, can assist in unifying families.