Saturday, May 11, 2013

MyHeritage To Announce Record Detective Feature

MyHeritage keeps adding new features to help genealogy and family history researchers build their online family tree, and also find records and contacts for persons in their tree.

I attended a meeting this morning at the NGS Conference with other geneabloggers where MyHeritage described their Record Detective feature.  It is described as a breakthrough technology that will save researchers time by finding records in the MyHeritage family trees and record collections without an intentional search.

(two Record Detectives, Ori Soen and Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage)

Users have to have a family tree on MyHeritage (which requires a subscription for a larger tree) and a Data subscription to see the records.

Some highlights of the Record Detective feature:

*  It's smart, reliable and unlike anything else.  A 97% success rate was quoted.

*  For every record you find (with a search, or from a Record Match for a person in your tree), it will identify other records for the person, and other persons (e.g., parents, siblings, spouse, children) linked to the first person.

*  It will find this new information by searching billions of records, in seconds.

*  It gives you links to the related records and MyHeritage or Geni family trees.

*  It is extremely accurate, so you can trust the information and sources.

MyHeritage will have much more information on Monday in their press release.

They showed another new feature - called Record Extraction.  From the list of Record Matches found for persons in your tree, you can select Facts to add to your MyHeritage tree from the records.  When you Confirm the record match (denoting that it applies to the specific person in your tree), you are given the option to add the facts.  For those who have already Confirmed a Record Match (I've done about 2,000 of them already), they can go to the list of Confirmed matches and add the Facts one person at a time to persons in their MyHeritage tree.

I asked about the delay time for a new subscriber who recently added their tree and is waiting for the Record Matches to appear.  They said that because of the addition of the 1790 to 1930 U.S. census records that the servers are working fulltime, and there is a one to two week backlog for Record Matches to appear.

When I get home and have access to my MyHeritage family tree I will take a look at it.  The Record Matching and Record Detective features are dependent upon the MyHeritage Data collection (which is essentially the same as the WorldVitalRecords collection).

Here is a picture of me with the Record Detectives.  They gave us all fake mustaches to wear...funny that the detectives aren't wearing mustaches!

(The two Record Detectives, myself and Daniel Horowitz)

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/05/myheritage-to-announce-record-detective.html
Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

Disclosure:  I have a complimentary PremiumPlus MyHeritage subscription and a complimentary Data subscription from MyHeritage, which I appreciate.  This does not affect my objectivity in writing about MyHeritage and its companion sites.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Randy for asking MyHeritage about matching delays for all your readers – many of us have been having problems as new MyHeritage subscribers with getting matches, syncing new software and NOT getting help from support.

As long ago as you last posted about this problem (May 5th), is how long I've been waiting for a support email to be answered - today I received a response ( Yippeee only 7 days) and they report that folks having problems with software should uninstall their software and reinstall new software form link that will fix issues – I thought you should know about this.

With no assistance from support I deleted my own ged file ( via web) and reloaded it via the web page only and I am now getting some smart / record matches. I guess I will reinstall the software at some point but I’m interested in the matching and don’t care about the syncing so I’ll wait.

Thanks again for your interest and help

Nancy Cunningham cunningb2@gmail.co

From my email this morning from MyHeritage support ---

I apologize for any inconvenience. I recommend you to uninstall the software then download it from the link below:

http://web009.myheritage.com/public/updates/7105/family_tree_builder_7105_cd.exe

It supposed to fix some issues.
m


Mac Torment said...

They give you a free account and you become an uncritical part of their marketing machine.
How the hell is this different from the record matching they already do.
Sounds like the only change is the new name, stolen from gendetective.