Monday, February 2, 2015

MyHeritage Searches for FamilySearch Family Tree Profiles

MyHeritage announced today, in a blog post titled "MyHeritage Adds 900 Million Global Historical Records" that they have added historical person profiles from the FamilySearch Family Tree to their SuperSearch results.  The blog post notes:
"The new content has been made available thanks to MyHeritage's partnership with FamilySearch and consists primarily of family tree profiles that have been submitted by more than 22 million FamilySearch users. Integration ensures that this data is refreshed on MyHeritage on a daily basis as it is updated on FamilySearch."
I wanted to see what the search results were, so I found the MyHeritage search page for the FamilySearch Family Tree (http://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-40001/familysearch-family-tree).

1)  I entered my grandfather, Lyle Carringer into the search field:


2)  The results of the search:


3)  Here's the top of the information from the FSFT for Lyle Carringer:


The information from the Family Tree profile is presented event by event, but not in perfect chronological order (e.g., the marriage in 1918 is listed before the Residence events that start in 1900).

If I run my mouse over the little blue icon next to the place name on one of the items and the Google Map locating the place popped up:


Further down the list, after all of the Events, the relationships (parents, spouses, children, siblings) are listed:


Note that the relationships are all linked to the profiles for those persons in the FamilySearch Family Tree.

There is also a "Source" link which points to the profile for the historical person.

Below the relationships is "Additional information," which includes the "Life Sketch" (a sort of Person Note):


At the bottom of the "Life Sketch" is the link to "Save this record and extract info to a person in your family tree."

4)  I clicked the green "Save" link and was provided the opportunity to attach the FamilySearch Family Tree record to the person (nd their relatives) in my MyHeritage tree.  


When I "save" that information, then I can also extract Event information to the MyHeritage person.  The source of the information attached will be the FamilySearch Family Tree profile.

5)  At the bottom of the Event list, and before the "Life Sketch," there was a link to the FamilySearch Family Tree profile for the person.  I clicked on that, and saw my grandfather's profile in the FamilySearch Family Tree:


I can edit the profile information in the FamilySearch Family Tree, and it will be refreshed in MyHeritage the next day.

Note that the user cannot see the Media (except for the primary image), Memories, Sources, Notes (other than the Life Sketch) and Discussions that are on the FamilySearch Family Tree in the MyHeritage profile.  To see those items, the user needs to visit the profile on the FamilySearch Family Tree (which requires registration).

6)  This is, I think, an excellent addition to MyHeritage that is a result of their collaboration with FamilySearch.  A MyHeritage user with a tree can capture information about a person from the FamilySearch Family Tree.

Like all online family trees, the accuracy of the information on the FamilySearch Family Tree needs to be evaluated by the user and added to their tree person only after judging the veracity of the information.

7)  With this addition to the MyHeritage website, we can see another benefit of the collaboration between FamilySearch and MyHeritage.  MyHeritage gained access to many FamilySearch historical record collections, and the FamilySearch Family Tree profiles, while FamilySearch received several technological capabilities and free access to MyHeritage for LDS Church members.

8)  I hope, and expect, to see the same sort of search capability of the FamilySearch Family Tree profiles on Ancestry.com and FindMyPast.com.

9)  One neat thing (at least for me!) is the number of profiles on the FamilySearch Family Tree, which shows up at the top of the MyHeritage search screen for the FamilySearch Family Tree:  it says 835,921,086 .  It will be interesting to see how that grows over the years.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/02/myheritage-searches-for-familysearch.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Geolover said...

A huge number of the 835,921,086 entries in Family Search Family Tree are duplicates (more or less, with varying errors of many types).

Does the MyHeritage display indicate when there are duplicate persons, or does it (or the FamilySearch program?) just pick one? If just one is shown, what are the parameters for the pick in research results?

Randy Seaver said...

I don't know the answers to Geolover's good questions. I searched in MyHeritage for FSFT entries for my Mayflower ancestors (which are IOUS) and none came up.

I investigated further and it appears that there are few profiles for persons born before 1700 for some reason. I can only go back 7-8 generations in my tree in MyHeritage, althoguh there are links in the FSFT back further in time.

Perhaps MyHeritage hasn't loaded all 835 million profiles yet.