Monday, June 3, 2013

Finally Received Record Matches on MyHeritage

At the NGS Conference in Las Vegas in May, I talked at some length with Gilad Japhet about the new MyHeritage features like Record Matches, Record Extraction, and Record Detective.    I wrote about Record detective in:

*  MyHeritage To Announce Record Detective Feature (11 May 2013)
*  First Look at Record Detective and Record Extraction Features on MyHeritage (13 May 2013)
*  Does the MyHeritage Record Detective Find My Isaac Seaver Search Results? (14 May 2013)

Gilad kindly offered me a second family tree site so that I could work with the Family Tree Builder 7.0 software, since the tree I have on MyHeritage would not sync to the Family Tree Builder 7.0 software for some reason (is it too old?  Too messed up?  I don't know!).

I was able to easily upload a smaller GEDCOM file (titled Seaver-Leland Family Tree) of just my ancestral families to Family Tree Builder 7.0, and then that was uploaded and synced to a new MyHeritage family tree.  I did during the week after the NGS Conference, on 16 May 2013.

But when I checked the tree on MyHeritage during the past three weeks, there were no Record Matches, and therefore the Record Detective didn't provide more matches.

I checked my MyHeritage page again today, and now there are Record Matches for my new tree.  So, it took under three weeks for a new tree to receive Record Matches.  I don't know if this is typical, but it may be.  I don't think that I received any "special treatment" for the Record Matches in this case.

1)  Here is the page listing the record collections with Record Matches (3 screens shown):




2)  I clicked on the Find A Grave listing, and then on one of the Record Matches listed, for Benjamin McKnew (two screens below, some overlap):



As you can see, there are some possibly related records in the "Record Detective" section below the Find A Grave information.  I ran my mouse over one of them in the screen above, and it provided the OCR text from that possible match.

3)  If I click on the possible record match, I see the newspaper page image with information about the paper, and also the other possible Record Matches found by the "Record Detective" (two screens shown):



4)  I clicked Back to the first screen with the Find A Grave Record Match, and clicked on the green "Confirm" button to register that the record pertained to the Benjamin McKnew in my tree:


5)  After I clicked on the Confirm" button, the "Extract Record" screen opened so that I could attach this record to the person in my tree (two screens below):



6)  When I go into my MyHeritage tree and go to Benjamin McKnew's person page, the attached record is shown in the left column under the Info tab heading of "Records."


7)  I checked the three newspaper articles, and since all three had the same information (but for different dates), I also extracted one of the records to Benjamin's file.

8)  As you can see, I can get Record Matches from the list of Record Matches, or from the Person Profile of a person.  I can Confirm or Reject those matches in either location.  Therefore, I can receive Record Matches if I'm going down the Record Match list for one source, or I can receive them in a Person Profile.

9)  What I cannot (yet) do is to do Research for a person and save pertinent search results to a Person Profile yet.  I'm hoping that MyHeritage is working on adding that feature!  I hope that MyHeritage is working on adding more database content also, and fixing the U.S. Census Record matching so that all matches are found in the census years before 1900.

Note that a MyHeritage user must have a Family Tree account and a Data account in order to perform the above searches and actions.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/06/finally-received-record-matches-on.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

Disclosure:  I have a complimentary subscription to both MyHeritage.com and WorldVitalRecords.com courtesy of MyHeritage, for which I am grateful.  However, this does not influence my objective opinions in reviews of these websites and their products. 

1 comment:

Robbhaas said...

It took me over 3 weeks to begin receiving record matches - my GedCom was about 4,000 people - I was quite disgusted with MyHeritage and their poor customer service - but I do have to admit the Record matches have been about 99% accurate - I have gained a wealth of information - As I stated to MyHeritage - all I ever wanted from them was the truth about how long it was going to take - they first told me it would be a few days and then it would be a few weeks and then finally I got them after 3+ weeks