MyHeritage adds 815 million U.S. Public Records

If you would like an eye opener today, read this post and do the MyHeritage.com search outlined below. MyHeritage.com announces today, 4 February 2014, that they have added 815 million U.S. Public records to their Super Search capability. The announcement is in a blog post entitled, "New:815 million US Public Records Added." Quoting from the post:

We did it again! We've just added 815 million US Public Records of people living in the USA to MyHeritage SuperSearch. This massive compilation of records was assembled from telephone directories, property tax assessments, credit applications, voter registration lists and other records available to the public. It includes information about hundreds of millions of people from the USA spanning the last five decades, making it one of the most powerful collections on SuperSearch for finding information about living relatives.

The key word here is LIVING relatives. All you out there who wring your hands and worry about your privacy are about to get a way to see exactly how much public information there is on the Internet about living people. Notice the types of records included and think about whether or not you have ever filled out one of those types of forms or had your name listed by a phonebook or a tax list.

That aside, this will be a major help to many of the people I know who are trying to get past the first generation of their genealogy. Even for those of us who are well past the 50 year mark in our research can benefit from this current availability of records. The announcement goes on to say:

Wherever the records include a full address, we've been able to deduce other possible relatives who were living at the same address. This can help you reconstruct entire households, determine if the records are relevant for the family you are seeking, and discover additional relatives you didn't previously know about. Other important information in these records includes birth dates, aliases, possible relatives (and their birth dates), as well as business associations and, where publicly available, contact information such as phone numbers.

All of this type of information has been available to the governments, financial institutions, credit agencies and attorneys for a long time, but has not been generally available to genealogists without a lot of hassle and some substantial fees.

Searching these records is available from a link in the blog post. This certainly adds considerable value to a MyHeritage.com subscription. I did quick search on my name and found a lot of information, phone numbers I had long forgotten, addresses and business associations that I am no longer a part of and a whole lot more. If you would like an eye opener today, read this post and do the MyHeritage.com search. Please read the rest of the announcement from MyHeritage.com before you ask me any questions.