Monday, April 20, 2015

MyHeritage Introduces Instant Discoveries to all Users

MyHeritage announced "Instant DiscoveriesTM Now Available for all MyHeritage Users" today.  The post starts out:

"We're delighted to announce that Instant Discoveries™ are now available for all MyHeritage users. Launched in December 2014, Instant Discoveries™ is a unique experience for discovering family history information and applying it to one's tree on MyHeritage with ease. Initially we released this experience only for new users - newcomers to family history - to make it easier for them to embark on their family history journey. By signing up at MyHeritage and entering some basic information about immediate family members, new users discovered ancestors, relatives and never-seen-before photos in just a few seconds. Following the successful launch we took Instant Discoveries™ to the streets of New York and demonstrated it to passers-by. It was incredible to see their emotional reactions.

"As of this week, we've taken this breakthrough technology to the next level, by providing the Instant Discoveries™ experience to all users of MyHeritage, enabling multiple individuals and photos to be added to existing family trees in just a few clicks"
Read their blog post for more information.

I wrote about this new feature last week in  MyHeritage Adds "Discoveries" to Your Family Tree ( posted 13 April 2015) but it didn't work well for me at the time (what it showed was done especially for me at RootsTech 2015).  

Now it works well.  Here is my experience this morning:

1)  From my MyHeritage home page, I ran my mouse over the "Discoveries" tab:


The "Discovery Hub" link is on the "Discoveries" tab as shown above.

2)  I clicked on the "Discovery Hub" and saw one of the Instant Discoveries that MyHeritage found for me.


This is one of the persons in my MyHeritage tree (but he is not an ancestor - he married a child of one of my ancestors).  I did not have his vital information or his parents, siblings or children in my tree.

The information for this person and the relatives in the Discovery come from another person's MyHeritage tree.  It may or may not be correct.  At this stage, I cannot check out the veracity of the information - I need to click the orange "View Discovery" button to see more details.

Note the left and right arrows on the bottom of the screen shot above - I can click those and see the other "Instant Discovery" persons and the prospective relatives.

3)  I clicked on the orange "View Discovery" button, and it compared information about my person (on the left side) and the the other tree's person (on the right side):


It is apparent that the information in the other MyHeritage tree is more detailed than mine (I only have a spouse's name, no birth or death or parents or siblings or children).  The screen above asks "Is this the same William Estes?"  I think that it is.

I would like to have the opportunity to click on the other tree person to see if the other tree owner has source citations for the information included, and then do some research to see if the information for the other relatives is correct.  MyHeritage doesn't provide that option at this time.  I essentially have to "add these persons to my tree to see what it includes."

4) I decided to click on the blue "Yes" button on the screen above.  


The screen above shows me the 10 persons that will be added to my MyHeritage tree if I click the blue "Add to my tree" button.

5)  I clicked the blue "Add to my tree" and saw a spinning bicycle wheel for about 15 seconds:


Then the screen below opened showing the added persons in my MyHeritage tree:


The message says "Congratulations. We've added 10 people to your tree!  The people that were just added via the Instant DiscoveryTM are marked with a "NEW" label."  The "NEW" label goes away after about 15 minutes.

6)  This portion of my MyHeritage tree now shows the common person and the 10 NEW persons in my tree.  



7)  What about the person profiles that were added to my tree?  I clicked on William Estes in my tree, and saw on his "Events" tab:


The only information added to this profile in my tree is the birth of the son of William and Ruth (Brewer) Estes.  The birth and death information for William Estes was not added.  I will have to do that research myself and add it to the person profiles one person and one event at a time, while adding source citations and notes.

8)  The birth and death information for the other ten persons added to my tree were added to those person profiles.  Here is the profile for Matthew Estes, brother of William Estes:


Birth, death and burial dates and places for Matthew Estes were added to the profile.  I will have to do more research myself and verify the above information, and add other events and relationships (spouses and children) to the person profiles one person and one event at a time, while adding source citations and notes.  I could also research each of the added persons on MyHeritage, add Event and relationship data, attach the source of the information, and appropriate notes.

I should also check the Smart Matches in other MyHeritage trees to see if any of them have sourced information for each of these profiles.  I can add birth and death information to William Estes, and the other added relatives, using those Smart Matches.  William Estes has 35 Smart Matches.

9)  Rather than provide my opinions about this new feature on this post I will write a separate post later.

The URL for this post is:

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post using the Comment link on the blog post.  If you want to send me an email about this post, please use randy.seaver@gmail.com  


1 comment:

Louis Kessler said...

As I read your post about this Randy, it is confirming my realization of how important it is becoming for everyone to have their own separate copy of their own tree made up of their own research that they themselves have verified.

No matter how good it looks, this is still third-party information to you which you have to decide to do one of two things with: either blindly trust it, or go out and verify it with the sources yourself.

I see no problem merging it to your tree at MyHeritage, Ancestry, FamilySearch or anywhere else, as long as it is not your own personal copy of your own research that you are merging it to.

But I would never merge that stuff down into my personal tree.

I know, Randy, you keep your personal tree on your own computer in RootsMagic, and your tree is rather large (tens of thousands of people), so I doubt that you've personally researched each and every one of them. That means there are some individuals in your tree whose information you got from somewhere that you "blindly" trust.

To me, the right way is to keep your personal research in your own file. Load other people's information into separate RootsMagic files and attribute them to the person who did them or to the online source you got them from.

Then with a program that allows you to "virtually merge" multiple data files into what looks like one big everyone file, you'll have the best of both worlds.

Louis