Knowing where you come from

Adam Gonn discovers a website where you can track your great-grandmother and beyond.

By ADAM GONN
Knowing where you come from (photo credit: Courtesy MyHeritage.com )
Knowing where you come from
(photo credit: Courtesy MyHeritage.com )
Genealogy or pursuit of family history has moved in the past decade from dusty archives to specialized websites.
One of the most successful ones is Israel-based MyHeritage.com, started seven years ago by Gilad Japhet in his garage.
Today, the company has over 63 million users who have uploaded more than one billion profiles to 23 million family trees created on the site. Most trees have between 250-2,500 profiles but some have up to 40,000.
MyHeritage allows users to search newspaper archives, public records and even an index with photos of headstone on graves to create as detailed a picture of their family members as possible.
However, while it may be possible for someone who has 250 profiles in their family tree to do an individual search in each archive for each profile, it can be very time-consuming. To solve the problem, the company has introduced SuperSearch, its latest technological advancement.
“SuperSearch represents a watershed innovation in the family history industry,” says Japhet. “It transforms family history into an experience that is more global, accessible and engaging than ever before.”
SuperSearch gives users access to the world’s largest historical newspaper collection, currently about 120 million pages dating back to the 18th century, as well as the 1930 and 1940 US census records, all UK censuses between 1841 and 1901 and the content from the family history websites WorldVitalRecords and FamilyLink, both operated by MyHeritage. The SuperSearch technology enables names to be translated between the 38 languages in which the site is available.
This allows users to look for relatives in other parts of the world without speaking a foreign language. If a search is conducted for Bill, the result will include variations of the name, such as William or Guillermo.
In addition to SuperSearch, MyHeritage is in the process of launching a new search function called record matching, which automatically runs in the background and searches all the records available without the user having to launch a separate search for every profile their family tree.
With record matching, users can find a number of different pieces of information about their relative, including the year of birth, marriage, and death and place of burial. The function also provides information from censuses, yearbooks, military and immigration records.
The most useful pieces of information often come from obituaries as they tend to include information about where someone is buried and even how they died, as well as a short summary of where they lived, their profession and family members still alive. All this information can be used to create more branches of the family tree.
An additional feature is called smart match technology, which alerts a user if someone else has created the same profile, thereby creating a live connection that may not have existed before.
Amnon Atzmon, a member of the Israel Genealogical Society, tells The Jerusalem Report he uses MyHeritage and finds it simple to switch between Hebrew and English, the two languages used to build his own family tree which, the last time he printed it, ran to more than 17 feet long.
He suggested that elderly users might be better served if the company offered customer support by phone as well as the current email-only system.