MyHeritage.com has announce the acquisition of over 150,000 fully digitized and searchable books to its Super Search technology. Here is a description of the collection which presently has 37,526,996 pages and 150,544 sources.
This collection includes a compilation of thousands of published books ranging from family, local and military histories, city and county directories, school, university and hospital reports, church and congregational minutes and much more. All records include images of the book's pages. We are continually growing this collection.
Further information was outlined in a blog post entitled, "
Huge Free Collection of Digitized Books Now Available on MyHeritage!" published on 7 Dec 2015.
The new collection includes tens of thousands of digitized historical books, with actual images of the books' pages, and all their text extracted using Optical Character Recognition. The books span the last four centuries and include family, local and military histories, city and county directories, school and university yearbooks, church and congregational minutes and much more. A vast amount of rich data from diverse publications makes this collection a fantastic source of rare genealogical gems, providing insight into the lives of our ancestors and relatives.
We've added this collection using a new process that adds approximately 250 million pages to SuperSearch™ per year, utilizing a team of 40 curators. The curators examine each digitized book for relevance to family history research, and enhance its meta data if they decide to include it. The collection is sourced from various published texts that are copyright-free, and will be updated from now on several times each year.
The Compilation of Published Sources collection is located in SuperSearch™ under Books & Publications and is free to access. Easily search the collection by any of the following: first name, last name, publication title, publication date, publication place, or keywords.
Our unique and powerful Record Matching technology is now matching this new collection automatically to all family trees on MyHeritage, and users are alerted if Record Matches are found for individuals in their family tree. Correct matches can be confirmed and source citations can be extracted directly to your family tree, using the extract information feature.
This will be a great addition to the over 6 billion records already available on
MyHeritage.com.
I wonder how much overlap there is with the collections in books.familysearch.org and archive.org and books.google.com. I’m finishing a timeline about someone named H—J— and need a little bit of information about his service in the War of 1812 so I’ll use applicable search terms and just look at the first page of results.
ReplyDeletearchive.org: First result: Muster Rolls of the Soldiers of the War of 1812. There's his name and regiment and information about when he served. After seeing this source I used the number of his regiment to find more specific information about his service in the war.
MyHeritage: Seventh result: Muster Rolls plus two mentions of him in other secondary sources.
FamilySearch: The first two results are highly unreliable family histories that nonetheless contain some documented information. The third is a false result for militiamen of the same last name in a different state.
Google Books: Muster Rolls listed first. False results for a Revolutionary War soldier, and two other secondary sources that didn’t show up in the other searches, one of them an important if wildly inaccurate source on the family.
So, it’s worth adding the MyHeritage source to my list of sources I check for every project. Thanks for featuring the collection!