Friday, July 1, 2011

Looking at the MyHeritage Person Profiles

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The www.MyHeritage.com online family tree provides a Person Profile for each person in my tree.  I wondered what was included in this Person Profile, and how to Edit or Add to it.

1)  On my MyHeritage website, I clicked on the "Family tree" Tab and the "Tree" link in order to navigate to a specific person in my tree.  I chose Isaac Seaver (1823-1901) (of course!), found him in the tree and clicked on his box in the tree:


The summary for Isaac Seaver appeared on the left of the screen. 

2)  I clicked the blue "View Profile" button next to Isaac's picture on the left side of the screen:


Isaac Seaver's information came up, including his vital records, his relationships (birth family, spouses, children), education, work, favorites, contact information, personal info, and source citations, and biography.

3)  I clicked on the "Edit Profile" link on the left side just below Isaac's picture and saw:


The "Essentials" screen for Isaac Seaver opened - it has birth, death and burial (and could have additional names, baptism and cause of death information if it was available) dates and places.  The site manager can edit this information, but cannot see the Source, edit or add a Source on this screen.

The other screens for the person are listed on the left-hand side of the screen.

4)  Next on the list of Person Profile screens is the "Family" screen:


The screen above lists the Parents and relationship to the parents, the Spouse(s) and relationship, with the marriage date and place, with a field for witnesses.  The site manager can add, edit or delete marriage information on this screen.  However, there is no listing of the children with each spouse on this page.  I would have thought that the Children would be shown on this screen with a link to them.  They are on the Person Profile screen (#2 above).

5) The next item on the Profile list is "Biography":


The Biography information reflects the Notes included in the GEDCOM file or typed/copied into the field on this screen.  In my case, I have extensive notes for many persons in the GEDCOM that I uploaded to MyHeritage.  I noted that all of my paragraph breaks are missing in the Biography page above.  It appears that MyHeritage does not recognize the GEDCOM tags that create a paragraph break.  I refuse to go through thousands of people to fix the Biographies.

6)  Next on the list of Profile screens are Contact Information, Work, Education, Favorites, and Personal Info.  I don't have any information in those fields, so I'll skip them.

Next is the "Source Citations" screen:



On the screen above, I could use an Existing citation or Add a new source citation.  If I wanted to use an existing citation, I could click the down arrow on the right of the Source field, and choose from existing sources:


Alternatively, if I click on the "Add new source" link to the right of the down arrow, I could add a new master source (shown below):


There are fields in the MyHeritage master source for Source title, Abbreviation, Author, Publisher, Agency, and Description, with a link to add an image of the source.

If a site manager selects an existing source or adds a new source, they can then add citation text, a page number or URL, a confidence level, and a date for the specific source citation.

8)  The last item on the Profile list is "All Facts":




This is the screen where all of the Facts associated with the person (e.g., birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial, census, military, immigration, occupation, etc.) are listed, along with the source citations for those Facts.  Description fields are available for some Facts to add additional information.  Place names can be typed in or selected from an existing place list.  There is a type-ahead function for the existing place names.  Residence, physical description and favorites are not edited on this screen.

Additional Notes (but not the Biography) and sources can be added on this screen.  If the site manager wants to use an existing master source, they can select it here.  If they want to Add a new master source, they can do it here.  In either case, they can add the citation information and attach an image.

Frankly, I'm not sure that I understand why the "Source citations" screen exists on the Person Profile pages.  The function is duplicated in the "All Facts" screen.  The logical thing for me is to change the "All Facts" to read "Source citations" because they apply to the Person in the Profile. 

If a user has a lot of master source citations (I have over 600), the dropdown menu to select the right one is cumbersome to use - the alphabetical listing of the sources is long, and all the sources that start with a quote mark are at the top of the list.

These Person Profile screens are logical to use whether adding or editing information.

The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2011/07/looking-at-myheritage-person-profiles.html

(c) 2011. Randall J. Seaver. All Rights Reserved. If you wish to re-publish my content, please contact me for permission, which I will usually grant. If you are reading this on any other genealogy website (other than an RSS or similar feed), then they have stolen my work.

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