Monday, October 14, 2013

Major Genealogy News - MyHeritage and FamilySearch Partnership

MyHeritage and FamilySearch have just announced a partnership (see New Partnership with FamilySearch Adds Billions of Recordsto MyHeritage!) that will add many records to MyHeritage search results and FamilySearch will receive the Super Search and Record Matching technologies and be used on the FamilySearch sites.

There is a question and answer dialogue on the MyHeritage blog post.  The two most important paragraphs for MyHeritage users are:

"Q: What will FamilySearch provide MyHeritage?
A: FamilySearch will share with MyHeritage a massive number of international records and family tree profiles which are key to researching family history. These include all profiles of deceased individuals from the FamilySearch Family Tree (about 1 billion profiles), and a large selection of global historical records (about 1.2 billion additional records).
Q: Which collections will be added to MyHeritage, and from which countries?A: The historical records come from hundreds of document collections from dozens of countries worldwide. These include vital records such as birth, baptism, marriage, and death records. The records originate from all over Europe and Latin America as well as the United States and Canada, Asia and other regions."

This is, I think, a major win-win for both parties.  There is no FamilySearch feature that does what the MyHeritage Record Match system does (it finds matches for persons in your tree and shows them to you), so they will vastly improve their record matching capabilities.  MyHeritage gets access to billions of indexed family history records for their subscribers, and can push those to their patrons in their Record Match feature.  Many of those indexed records are in countries outside of North America.
One thing that is unclear to me is how "free" the FamilySearch records will be for MyHeritage subscribers with a free registration.  If a subscriber has a MyHeritage "Data Subscription," they should be able to see all of the FamilySearch records and attach them to persons in the MyHeritage trees.  
Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seave

3 comments:

Geolover said...

Randy, you say you think this is win-win for both outfits.

That may be true, but this statement in the FAQ is laughable:

"FamilySearch will share with MyHeritage a massive number of international records and family tree profiles which are key to researching family history."

The Family Tree should have been omitted from the sentence. Maybe in about 10 years, ~if~ very large numbers of excellent researchers consider it worth the time and effort to make major repairs, the FamilySearch Family Tree could be around 30%-50% accurate.

Every tree-hosting operation has its own reasons for promoting these trees as major tools for research.

Andrew Hatchett said...

"family tree profiles which are key to researching family history."

AAARRRGGGHHHHHHHHH!

Family Tree Profiles have never been, are not presently, and hopefully never will be, "key" to researching family history!

Unknown said...

So Ancestry is buying up all the other genealogy sites, I have already noticed that you can not get into images on most of Family Search records already from Ancestry buying them, even though the site remains free, while we input information free to Ancestry.