Tracing the Tribe: Israeli genealogy website offers major upgrade

A favorite site of mine is MyHeritage.com, based in Bnei Atarot, near Tel Aviv.

I've known its CEO, Gilad Japhet, for a number of years and have written stories on the company along the way.  He has also spoken to several Jewish genealogy groups in Israel and at the 2006 International Jewish genealogy conference in New York.

Many readers will recognize MyHeritage as the web site behind the "Find the Celebrity in You" which utilizes its rather amazing image handling capabilities.

The site has nearly 20 million members,   offers an easy-to-use online Family Tree Builder and family websites. Components are also offered in 15 different languages, as well as dual entry. In other words you can enter a tree in Hebrew and English, in English and French, in Spanish and French and many other languages, which will make it easy to share with family in different countries.

The site's great genealogy search engine, just upgraded this week, now searches some 1,400 genealogy websites at once to provide targeted information on the names you are researching.

The search engine - My Heritage Research - currently searches across more than 10 billion records to provide the most extensive genealogy searches on the Internet. The price is also right - it's free.

This upgrade has added hundreds of new genealogy databases. If you've tried it before, try it again for even more results.

Researchers can enter only a family name or a combination of given and family name. Use the above link to search the database. Parameters include exact spelling or multiple spelling variations (called Megadex by MyHeritage). The length of time required for the extensive resources being searched may take a few minutes, and also depends on your computer (older ones may take longer) and connection speeds. If you've got a new handy-dandy computer and fast Internet, results will appear very quickly.

It is very useful if researchers are looking for a rare or uncommon name or a combination of a rare first and last name. The best thing is that it produces genealogically relevant searches. You can of course Google a particular name but you'll retrieve lots of sites with not very useful information. With Megadex, you get hits on your names from genealogy sites.

For Jewish genealogists, there's more good news. MyHeritage has collaborated with JewishGen and the JewishGen All-in-One search has been added to MyHeritage Research. Thus, the search will now include almost all JewishGen databases, not available elsewhere on the Web.

The company is asking users to share success stories, submit requests for adding additional sites in MyHeritage Research or report bugs. All can be posted to the Support Forum.

The MyHeritage team is always working to bring researchers new tools. A recent breakthrough is Smart Matching technology connecting family trees submitted by users. More information will soon be available on this development, and for those who want more now, check out the site's company blog here http://www.myheritage.com/blogs/companyblog/ for details on improvements.

For all postings to Tracing the Tribe - The Jewish Genealogy Blog, visit http://tracingthetribe.blogspot.com. Send questions for Schelly to tribeblog@jta.org