Partnership between MyHeritage and FamilySearch adds billions of records to MyHeritage

On the heels of the announcements from FamilySearch.org, MyHeritage.com has confirmed the agreement between the two and added some comments explaining the arrangement. The basic statement is in a blog post entitled, "New partnership with FamilySearch adds billions of records to MyHeritage!" The initial statement from MyHeritage.com is as follows:

We’re delighted to announce that MyHeritage has entered into a strategic partnership with leading genealogy organization FamilySearch, which will bring billions of global historical records and family tree profiles spanning hundreds of years to MyHeritage.

The blog post goes on to state:

In the next few months, we’ll add more than 2 billion records from FamilySearch’s global historic record collections and profiles from its online family tree to SuperSearch, MyHeritage’s search engine for historical records.

This will make the additional records available to MyHeritage users as follows:

Our matching technologies will be unleashed on these new records and profiles so MyHeritage users will receive Smart Matches™ and Record Matches whenever any of them match their family trees. This will bring significant new opportunities for MyHeritage users to grow their family trees and enrich their family history.

The timing on this happening is phrased as "the next few months." Access to all of these records will require a MyHeritage.com data subscription, but some of the records will be free. The records consist of  "all profiles of deceased individuals from the FamilySearch Family Tree (about 1 billion profiles), and a large selection of global historical records (about 1.2 billion additional records)."

Sometime during 2014, quoting from the post, "MyHeritage will give FamilySearch access to its technologies for Smart Matching™ and Record Matching so that FamilySearch users will be able to receive matches in the FamilySearch website, especially with the historical records shared by FamilySearch." FamilySearch will not have access to content uploaded to MyHeritage in the current family trees.

This is a win-win situation. MyHeritage gains the collections of source records that it needs to provide its users from around the world with information about their ancestors and FamilySearch gains technology that is essential to searching the records. It is highly advantageous to the users of both programs. Both gain essential elements to allow them to find their ancestors.

Another unrelated blog post from Mocavo.com recently reported the results of a poll of their users concerning use of the Family History Library. This was obviously aimed at only genealogists because Mocavo.com is a genealogy search engine and content provider. The results showed that only about 35% of the genealogists who responded to the poll used FamilySearch.org. This is an incredible statistic, if accurate, showing that FamilySearch.org needs the type of alliance offered by MyHeritage.com to increase access to its database collections.