Special offer from MyHeritage.com

NOTE: The special offer expired on March 8, 2014.

As my blog grows in popularity, various companies approach me from time to time to participate in advertising promotions. I decided many years ago when I was involved in retail sales, that I would not promote any product that I was not personally enthusiastic about. This rule has carried over to my participation in the genealogical community. As I write my blog, I will pass on information about new products and services but I will not promote a product unless I personally use it and am enthusiastic about it.

During the past year or so, many people have identified me with MyHeritage.com primarily because of my involvement in RootsTech 2013 where I substituted in presenting their keynote address.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have now heard that they will be given free access to the three large online genealogical database programs, subject to some conditions, which have yet to be fully explored. Please take note of this, as I do not want my readers who are members of the LDS Church and unaware of the program to pay for subscriptions and then find out that their subscription could have been free sometime in the future.

As I have done in the past, I am now offering this special offer from MyHeritage. Those of my readers, who are members of the LDS Church, will have to take into consideration that they may have free access to the program sometime in the future.

Over the past few months the upgrades and new records added to MyHeritage.com make me even more enthusiastic about the company.

In just the past few months they have announced:

• 815 million US public records - this allows you to search for recent relatives, lost biological family and grandparents where you are missing basic information. and contact relatives you are looking for.
• BillionGraves and MyHeritage partnership to preserve tombstones around the world– this will allow much faster indexing of the world’s tombstones as MyHeritage recruits its tens of millions of members to help in this important project.
• 160 million US and UK records added.
• 138 million Geni profiles now available on MyHeritage SuperSearch.
• Add family tree profiles from records – this new feature allows you to grow your tree as you find new people through MyHeritage Record Matches.
• 90 million Nordic records added.
• Enrich multiple profiles from a single record match – when you confirm a Record Match. MyHeritage pulls the other family information at the same time allowing you to extract information from many people in a few clicks!
• FamilySearch Partnership – 2 more billion records added to MyHeritage.

These new features, content and partnerships are making MyHeritage a very important site, with the technology to break down many barriers.

In full honesty I have seen a few complaints made to me directly concerning issues with the program. I have worked through those issues and in many cases directly with the participation of MyHeritage's representatives, I have been totally satisfied with their support of their users. In most instances I have traced the problems reported to me as originating with defects in the GEDCOM file uploaded by the users. MyHeritage.com has solved the other issues, one that was handled when I got an email from a MyHeritage.com user. The tree in question had an improperly and very unusually formatted name, MyHeritage’s CEO Gilad Japhet personally responded to the complaint and used it as an opportunity to quickly improve MyHeritage based on the unusual formatting.

As with any large organization, there are detractors, but I have not found any of the complaints to be due to fundamental issues with the program. If the statistics on the MyHeritage.com map page are accurate, they now have over 70 million members around the world. There are a lot of people that see that this program is beneficial and I do too.

Most recently, the number of automatically obtained sources for my online family tree has increased dramatically. The inclusion of new records has provided information that I previously was unaware of. In my opinion, the price of the program is well worth the benefits, especially with this special offer. Even if I knew that the program would be free in the future, with my background in programming and product development, I would not want to wait until the changes to the product were developed before I took advantage of the automatic research available through uploading a family tree.

I am presently looking at over 6500 sources from Record Matches delivered to me, and with the automatic searching of additional records through the Record Detective feature, I am adding new people and many new records to my database as fast as I can do the work. Would I give up all that to wait until the program was offered for free? I suppose you will have to answer that question yourself, If this dilemma applies to you.

I have seen great success using MyHeritage and continue to confirm Record Matches that are adding great record finds to my tree. I am happy to present you this special offer and hope it will be as beneficial to you as it has been to me.