MyHeritage Passes the 8 Billion Record Mark

MyHeritage.com continues its meteoric growth by passing the 8 billion record mark in July of 2017. Quoting from their blog post entitled, "We’ve Surpassed 8 Billion Records on SuperSearch!":

How big is the number 8 billion? 8 billion seconds is 2,222,222 hours, 92,592 days, or 253 years. According to recent surveys, the world population will hit 8 billion people in 6 years time, Americans check their phones 8 billion times per day, and across the United States, drivers were stuck in traffic for 8 billion hours in 2015. It’s also the number of historical records that we now have on MyHeritage SuperSearch™!

Where are all those records? You need to look in two places. On the MyHeritage.com startup page, you need to click on the Research tab in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.

There are two selections that will show you all the records: The Research link itself and the Collection Catalog. The screenshot above shows the Research or SuperSearch page. Here is a screenshot of the Collection Catalog page:

Of course, the most efficient way to search all of these records is to have your family tree on the MyHeritage.com website and subscribe to include the data plan. With this level of subscription, you will get Record Matches and the added hints from the Record Detective. These search programs will automatically search all of the records for hints for everyone in your family tree and do so more accurately than you could ever do yourself. Here is a further explanation from MyHeritage.com Blog post:

Historical records are invaluable for family history research. They are vital for making new family connections and uncovering information about ancestors. We’re thrilled to have surpassed 8 billion historical records. It is a very important milestone, and we look forward to reaching more milestones in the months and years to come as we continue to add millions of new records to SuperSearch every single day. We are constantly working hard to add more global content and to make researching your family history easier and more accessible than ever before. 

In May we introduced our Collection Catalog, a new section on our website listing the historical record collections indexed and available on SuperSearch. The catalog is useful for beginners as well as professional users, as it details the number of records each collection contains, which collections are new, and the date in which each collection was added or last updated. It is a gateway to our vast historical treasure trove of 8 billion records. 

How we count records 

Each collection of historical records in SuperSearch includes a precise record count. In structured collections, such as census records, birth, and marriage records, each individual name is counted as one record. For example, a marriage document naming both the bride and groom is counted as two records. Nicknames or aliases are not counted as additional records. In family trees, each tree profile is counted as one record, even when it is available in more than one language. Each photo is counted as one record. In unstructured collections, such as newspapers or yearbooks, each page is counted as one record.

To understand more about this vast record collection and features of the MyHeritage.org website, please read the blog post.