Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Checking out the new MyHeritage Profiles

I received an email last week from MyHeritage.com saying (in part):

"We wanted to let you know about the new enhanced Web profiles we've recently added to the site. This is a completely free feature.

"Every person in your family tree now has an enhanced profile with all biographical info available in one attractive and convenient page. The new profile page includes a map showing the geographical trail of a person through life, and a list of close family members, each with a link to their enhanced profiles.

"Also note the new page we've added for editing profiles. It can be accessed by clicking 'Edit profile' in the new profile page. The new editing page provides 8 convenient tabs for entering richer info into each profile. You can now enter additional names like a nickname, former name and religious name; enter marriage info (including civil marriage) and witnesses; specify adoption and foster parents and document a person's favorites. You can include in-depth information for each person: from writing their biography and documenting their education and career – to providing a rich array of contact information.

"Flexible date entry is now supported in Web profiles including entering non-exact dates like 'Circa 1920' and 'Before 1980'.

"More enhancements in this area are on the way, including sources and citations, embedding YouTube videos and other Web content in profiles, and the addition of many more fact types."

I decided to see what the profiles looked like. I have a free account at MyHeritage with two family tree databases on the site. I went to www.MyHeritage.com and logged in. I selected the "Family Tree" tab from my web site page, and saw my pedigree chart. I selected Frank Walton Seaver from the tree and saw:




Basic information about the highlighted person in the tree is shown in the panel on the left side. This area has space for a picture, shows the Facts for the person, and has a "View Profile" button. I clicked on the "View Profile" button and saw:



On the Profile for Frank Walton Seaver, it lists the immediate family - spouse, children, siblings and parents. Further down the page is the "Info" tab with further information - education, work, favorites, contact information, personal info and biography:


As you can see in the screen above, the research notes that I have in my database are in the Biography section. I could edit any of these sections with one click.

There is an "Events" tab also, which looks like:




In this tab, each Event in the file for Frank Walton Seaver is listed, with a small map with stick-pins showing the persons birth, marriage and death events.

Frankly, I don't remember how detailed these person profiles were in earlier versions of MyHeritage.com.

These current features provide a state-of-the-art presentation for person profiles. There are no sources or citation features yet.

Navigation is fairly easily and pretty quick in this system - you can click on persons in the family tree and see their information, and in the Person Profiles, you can click on the spouses, parents, siblings or children to see their profiles.

In summary, if you have an online family tree at MyHeritage.com, they have improved the navigation and display to information in person profiles. We still have to wait for sources and some other features.

1 comment:

Steve Hayes said...

I've been a bit suspicious of My.Heritage, since my family tree suddenl;y appeared there without my putting it there. Apparently they got it from Gencircles.

Then they kept telling me it was too big, so unless I paid them, I couldn't respond to any queries about it, or give other people access to it. Now sending money overseas is a schlep, and also the bank charges are exorbitant, so I'm not planning to pay them, since I didn't ask them to have my family tree in the first place. What they haven't told me is how big is "too big", and how I can replace the big version with a shrunk version.