Friday, February 26, 2016

Where Did 17,132 More MyHeritage Record Matches Come From? Published Books!

I check on my MyHeritage Record Matches count in my MyHeritage family tree every week or so, and was really surprised to see that I had 17,132 more Record Matches than I did on 16 February 2016.  I added a few persons to the tree recently, but 17,132?  Note:  The numbers include all Matches (Pending, confirmed and Rejected) with 1 star or better.

When I checked the list of "Record Matches by Collections" I saw the reason why:  There is a Collection called "Compilation of Published Sources."  I have 17,466 matches now in that collection:


I recalled that MyHeritage added 150,000 published books back in December 2015, and I wrote about searching that collection in MyHeritage Releases Over 150,000 Family History Books - FREE to Access (8 December 2015).

It looks like MyHeritage is now providing Record Matches for those published books.  Bravo!  This means that users can add a link to those book pages to persons in their family tree.  

I selected the "Compilation of Published sources" collection on the list above, and then chose to see the Record Matches by "Last name" in the dropdown menu at the top right of the screen below:


The list started at A surnames, but I really wanted to see the Seaver names.  I could have skipped page to page to find it, but instead I switched to seeing 100 matches at a time, and then figured out that there were 175 pages for this collection, and I needed a way to guess the page number to find the Seaver folks.  By skipping to the last page number shown at the bottom of the page, I eventually got to page 74 which had many Seaver entries.  This system really needs a surname search!

Here is the top of one of the pages with Seaver matches:


I wanted to see what the match at the top of the page looked like, so I clicked on the name of the boo, and saw:


This particular match is a biographical book that I don't recall seeing.  There is information about three or four Seaver generations which may be useful to other researchers who access my online family trees.

Further down, there is information about the source of the book and an OCR transcription of the text of the page:


And at the bottom of the page is the orange "Confirm" button and some Record Detective results:


I confirmed the match, and added the Source to the person profile.  I could copy the transcribed information above and add it to the note for this person and several others.

After looking at several pages of results, I noted that there is some duplication of matches, which is understandable.  Married females are listed under their maiden name, but after the last person with the surname without a different married surname.  So Edith Rachel Seaver (Adams) is listed after William Whitney Seaver.

Once again, the MyHeritage technology advances has helped me find resources that I did not have a month ago.  It will take some time to go through these and confirm or reject them.

If you have a MyHeritage tree and data subscription, go check your Record Matches and see if they have found entries in the published book collection for your tree persons.  You may find something that really aids your research.

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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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