Rabbit Holes With Randy - Using the MyHeritage "Matches By Source" Feature

 Another day, another rabbit hole.  Today, it was browsing through the MyHeritage "Matches by Source" feature.  If you have a family tree on MyHeritage, then you will have this feature - look under "Discoveries" and click on "Matches by Source."

The list of sources with records that MyHeritage thinks match a person in one or all of your family trees (I have 4) on MyHeritage is ordered by number of record matches.  Here is my current list (two screens - the top 11 are shown below).

There are 285 MyHeritage record collections with at least one match to someone in my trees.  The top record collection, FamilySearch Family Tree, has 44,354 matches that I have not looked at yet.

One of the most useful is the "Compilation of Published Sources" (books and other published material) - I have 1,303 pending matches on this list:

There is a wealth of newspapers on this list - Chronicling America, and each state has a Newspapers listing, plus Canada.  Here is the top match from Pennsylvania Newspapers (I have 461 pending matches):

And Canada Newspapers (I have 292 pending matches):

There are also many record collections for states and countries.  I checked out the Denmark listings - there are 14 of them.  Here is the first match to a person in my MyHeritage tree in "Denmark Church Records, 1576-1919":

This is my grandsons' 2nd great-grandfather confirmation record in 1895.  I clicked the orange "Review match" button and saw:

And further down the screen is the record image:

I use this "Matches by Source" listing all the time.  MyHeritage has done the search for me, based on the information in my tree, for every person in my tree.  If I add a family, MyHeritage finds the information in their record collections for me.  I often find a marriage date/place or a death date/place in the listings for a given person in my tree that I did not have before.  

Of course, you can find all of the matches on the profile of the person in your family tree.  Brown circle icons are Record Matches (historical records, including family trees) and green circle icons are Smart matches (to other MyHeritage trees).

Beware though, not every match is correct.  Especially for newspaper records.  The researcher needs to apply critical thinking to each suggested match - is this the right person?  

Some people were really famous and had their name in the newspaper many times - Frank Figone (on the 3rd image above, a relative of my grandsons) was an Italian singer and had his name in the San Francisco records and newspapers dozens of times, and I think MyHeritage found every one of them!

Going down this rabbit hole every week usually adds dozens of records to my family tree.  

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Disclosure:  I have had a fully paid Ancestry.com subscription since 2000.  Ancestry.com has provided material considerations for travel expenses to meetings, and has hosted events and meals that I have attended in Salt Lake City, in past years.

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