Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Tuesday's Tip -- MyHeritage Book Collection Searches Are FREE

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Search the 447,000 plus volumes in MyHeritage's Book Collection for FREE - no subscription required.

1)  I watched the Mike Mansfield webinar "Brand New: Book Matching Technology at MyHeritage" over the weekend on Family Tree Webinars (www.familytreewebinars.com):


I highly recommend watching this webinar - it is FREE to watch - to see how to use the Book Matching technology and the background technology that makes it work.

2)  There are over 447,000 books in the "Compilation of Published Sources" collection, with over 91 million pages.  

In the webinar, Mike Mansfield said that this collection is FREE to search and find published records - the user does not need a subscription to MyHeritage.  

I decided to try it without logging into my MyHeritage account.  Here is the "Research" screen (two slides):


To get to the book collection, click on the link on the right for "Books & Publications (https://www.myheritage.com/research/category-8020/books-publications).  That opens the search screen for the specific collection:


3)  I put the name of Jonathan Oatley in the search fields for the name, and clicked on "Search" and received 306 matches:


If I had clicked on the "Exact Search" box, I would have received 42 matches.

4)  From the screen above, I clicked on the first match, and saw:


The search terms are highlighted on the page image above.  I can manipulate the image, even go full screen, and can save the page image to my computer.

Further down, the source information is provided and an OCR transcription is provided for the text:


5)  This is a fantastic online genealogy library - over 447,000 books with genealogy and family history content.  It is not EVERY genealogy book ever published, but it is a significant portion of the out-of-copyright books available at libraries all over the world and online at other book websites like Internet Archive and Google Books.  There are more genealogy and family history books here than are in the Family History Library catalog.

6)  Try it - it's FREE - you may find books and records that help you resolve a genealogical problem, or add to your knowledge of your ancestral families.  

7)  If you have a MyHeritage family tree, and a data account, then the Record Matching technology on MyHeritage will provide you with Record Matches from this book collection for persons in your family tree. I have found that it's easier to search for specific people using the search form than trying to find a Book Match for a specific person.

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1 comment:

ncaton said...

Their search engine seems to suffer from the same issues that afflict ancestry - too many positive results. 1100 of them for one of my great grandfathers, and it was the same whether I used the goneric search or the one with his birth year and state specified. When asking for Missouri, that should narrow down the choices, or at least affect the sort order, but it doesn't. Perhaps the search is better if you are logged in, but it's not a great advertisement in the long run.