Thursday, April 16, 2015

Updated MyHeritage iOS Mobile App - Research Features

I posted MyHeritage iOS Mobile App Appears to be Updated yesterday, which indicated that the "look and feel" of the Family Tree and individual profiles had changed, but didn't find any new features.  

In this post, I want to continue investigating the app's Research capabilities.  

1)  I navigated in the iOS mobile app to my great-grandfather, Thomas Richmond (1848-1913):



I wanted to see what would happen if I tap the "Research" button under his name.

2)  The search in all of the databases available on MyHeritage found 892,917 results with the first name, last name, and birth year in the search fields (without the exact search box checked):


I noted that the first 22 matches were for one of the other online tree systems - FamilySearch, MyHeritage, WikiTree or Geni.  Then records followed according to the limited search criteria.

I didn't feel like scrolling through that many records to find census records for him.

3)  I wanted to change the search criteria to only census records, so I tapped the double right-arrow next to the name in the screen above, and saw the search fields:


I could have added more search criteria by tapping on the "Edit search" button.

On the list of record types, I tapped the "Census and Voter Lists" category, and saw:


Scrolling down, I found the 1900 U.S. Census for my Thomas Richmond:


4)  I tapped on the name on the screen above to see the information in the 1900 census and saw:


There's the transcribed and indexed information for the person.  Further down is an image of the census page and the household members:


And further down are the "Record Detective" results - related records and related people:



5)  All of that is very useful - the user can see what's in a record, can see the record, and can see related records by tapping the image shown.  

It would be more helpful to add more search criteria from the person's profile - a birth place, death date, a death place, a marriage date, a spouse's name, parents names, etc.  That would drive the "best matches" to the top of the results list as long as the search was not "exact."

However, the user cannot do anything but look.  There is no capability to attach a document or photograph image to the person searched, or to extract specific data items in the record into the person's profile.  The MyHeritage website permits record attachment and data extraction, but the current iOS mobile app does not.  Perhaps this feature will be added in a future version.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/04/updated-myheritage-ios-mobile-app.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


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