Major Genealogical Advances Announced by MyHeritage

Gilad Japhet's Keynote Address at MyHeritage LIVE

MyHeritage.com continues its dominance of the development of new genealogical technology with several important announcements made by Gilad Japhet, the CEO of MyHeritage, at the first annual MyHeritage LIVE Conference in Oslo, Norway. The first part of the Keynote was the emotional and very interesting story of Gilad's genealogical discoveries about his ancestral family. This part of the presentation is essentially a model of the way current genealogical research should proceed. In the second part of the presentation, Gilad covers the latest technological marvels from the wizards at MyHeritage.

The first of these announcements concerns increasing the accuracy and information available from MyHeritage DNA matches. Here is an example of a 2nd cousin DNA match from my DNA analysis on MyHeritage.com.

I have removed the name for privacy concerns. In the right-hand column, there are three Family Tree details: a summary of the number of matches in our family trees, common ancestral surnames, and now, ancestral places in common. If I review the match, I will see additional details about our related ancestral lines.

However, this is just the beginning of the complete analysis. The newly added area includes a map of shared ancestral places.

This information is extremely valuable and it is detailed down to the exact locations. This comparison enables me to determine whether or not I believe the information in the shared family tree to be accurate, but it also gives me a better idea of our joint ancestry. For example, if we return to the United States, I can see exactly which close ancestors we have in common.

You need to review this information if you have already submitted a DNA test to MyHeritage.com. If you have done a DNA test, but do not have your family tree information online on the website, you are missing the whole reason why DNA testing is an important adjunct to genealogical research.

The next announcement from Gilad was the U.S. City Directory Project. MyHeritage is working on adding nearly one billion records with structured content that will show Record Matches with all of the references to any one individual consolidated across time. The entire collection will be fully searchable with new directories being added.

Gilad Japhet's Keynote Address at MyHeritage LIVE

Next, MyHeritage is expanding its newspaper coverage to millions of historical Newspapers from Europe, including the Netherlands, Austria, and other countries. These records will also be fully searchable.

Gilad’s Keynote Address - MyHeritage LIVE - November 2018

In partnership with FamilySearch, plans are for MyHeritage to add 15 million new records from the Czech Census from 1857 to 1921.

Gilad’s Keynote Address - MyHeritage LIVE - November 2018

The announcement also includes partnership records from FamilySearch for 8 million Brazil records and indexing 14 million also from a partnership with FamilySearch.

The last part of Gilad's presentation dealt with further developments in DNA testing and analysis. This part starts at about 50 minutes into the presentation. You REALLY need to listen to what he has to say about DNA testing. Now the biggest news of all.

Extracting DNA from old envelopes

Gilad’s Keynote Address - MyHeritage LIVE - November 2018

I am not going to explain this whole idea and process here, you will have to watch what is said in the presentation. But I am going to identify a number of my old envelopes and wait for the announcement of the opportunity to extract the DNA from them.