Warning: This is a long post with lots of screenshots. Just thought you should know.
I was able to square away my account with MyHeritage and indeed, when you sign up for a Premium or PremiumPlus account you get access to the Premium features of the new FTB3. So let's go check them out together, shall we?
First off, the most important feature in my book, is SmartMatching. I will use Milton B. Tuggle, my wife's 2nd-Great-Grandfather for this example. When a SmartMatch is found for someone in your tree you will see a little green circle under their name. If you place your mouse over the green circle a little pop-up window will tell you how many matches were found. It says to double-click, but a single-click works too:
When you get the matches page you see your entry at the top and all matches below, sorted by order of quality of match (we'll get to that in a second). Hover over any detail on the screen and you will get a pop-up with more details:
You can also see whether or not you confirmed the match, the tree name and site owner where the match was found. When you hover over Quality you get a pop-up that shows details for the quality of the match, specifically names, dates, ancestors, siblings and descendants:
Not much is new so far, but when you go to the actual match you find the new 'Merge' button in the middle-left of the screen. But first you can see that there is a tree comparison between your tree on top and the other tree on the bottom. On the right hand side are the person's details and as you click through these partial trees (they only show three generations) the matching person in the other tree is automatically selected). So let's click on the 'Merge' button because this is where the fun begins:
So when you start merging you get a list of everyone related to the person in question and whether or not they have any new information to add. You can select to auto-merge the person, which means you don't have to do anything and the software will merge all information intelligently and automatically. Or you can go step-by-step which is what I recommend you do:
When you start the merging process you go one person at a time through the list and decide who you want to merge the information to or whether or not you want to skip that person altogether. You can also add new people, chose to do an auto-merge or just copy all the information. You get a summary of the details from both trees as well:
My biggest issue with this process is that you don't see whether or not this information is properly sourced and cited. But you will see later that any information you add from a SmartMatch merge is deemed secondary evidence in the citation confidence field.
So here's an example of merging options for Milton's father. As you can see the first name doesn't match because of a spelling discrepancy. I spell it Pinckney while the other site spells it Pinkney. I can chose to merge the names, which in this case would just keep my name but in other cases will actually add the other name as a middle name. I can keep my name or take the name from the other site:
The next fact is a little more interesting. I am unsure of the exact marriage date of Milton's parents, but since I have no idea what the source is for the date on the other site, I can add it to my data, but instead of replacing my data I can just choose to add it as a new marriage fact:
The next step is to confirm the match and add a citation for the new information. You can also reject the match or leave it as undetermined:
And finally, you get a summary of the planned merge. You can still cancel at this point if you like or go back and make changes:
So that was very straight forward and simple for anyone to follow. This is in line with FTB3 and MyHeritage's concept of easy-to-use tools.
I wanted to see what happened with that marriage fact that I added. So I went to Pinckney's family information page and checked the facts tab. You can see that there are two marriage facts - one is my original fact with a date range and the other is the alternate marriage fact I just added during the merge process:
You can also check out the details page for Pinckney and under citations you will find the source for this new information - Source, Page, Date as well as Confidence automatically entered as 'Secondary evidence' and a tect comment about this information 'Added by confirming a Smart Match'. All this was added without my intervention:
So to summarize this feature - I think it's great! I only wish there was some way to see the source details before merging new or potentially conflicting data. Hopefully this might be something that will be added in the future.
In future posts I will detail some of the other new features. Any requests?
As you may have read on other blogs, MyHeritage came out with a new version of Family Tree Builder today. I downloaded it and tried it out. There are a lot of things I like and a few I am a bit confused about.
There's a new Premium version of FTB3 that costs. Now this might be a little confusing, so try to follow along. When I first saw the word Premium, I immediately thought it had to do with the naming of the account types on the MyHeritage website. They have Basic, Premium and PremiumPlus site accounts. You might think that someone with a Premium or PremiumPlus account will automatically gain access to all the new features, but it doesn't look like it right now. I am still trying to figure that one out.
So what are these premium features? Here's a screenshot of what they are:
The most important one in my opinion is the ability to merge SmartMatches:
Now the free version has basic SmartMatching, but the real power is the ability to grab information from another tree and merge into your own. This poses a few issues and I have yet to try out this feature fully, but my biggest concern is whether or not you can see if the new information you are about to merge is sourced properly and what is the quality of that source.
My previous issue with SmartMatches was that they were unmanageable. What I mean by that is that in my tree of almost 10K people I had no way to filter out the important people I wanted to find matches for. You can navigate through the tree and look for the little green circle, but when you're at the SmartMatch page you are basically faced with a long list that gets truncated at some point.
I know MyHeritage has been working on improving this functionality and indeed I was able to find some people who had a single match, which I couldn't see before. I really want to get my hands on the full functionality and see what else has been enhanced. Currently I'm waiting for the site to process my tree and give me the basic results. So I'll need to give an update later.
The next big deal is the SmartResearch feature:
What are these 100 most important genealogy site on the internet? I tried to find more info in FAQs and on the site but I couldn't. I am very curious to see what the results are. I already love the regular research engine they have with about 1400 sites, so this could be a great improvement.
I'm not so sure what the next one is though. Is this just a big chart of everyone related to me? It's called the All-In-One Chart:
I'm not sure what the big deal is here. I can get that in several ways from other sources (I think). If you look at your family tree on the MyHeritage website you see a very limited view, so this might be the expansion of this limited view.
And the last one is a nice-to-have in my book:
I have rarely seen people loading videos or documents before. And documents usually come in some sort of scanned format. So does this allow loading PDF files instead of JPG files? I guess I'll have to try it out and see.
This might sound like I am critical of MyHeritage or the functionality that FTB3 offers. I am not. I am extremely excited about these new developments and some of these features are fantastic. Let me tell you about a few other fantastic features you may not know about:
1) Photo Tagging. This has been one of my favorite tools so far. Not just because I can load an entire photo and say who's who (you can do that in many other sites including Facebook and Geni). The real beauty is that the software identifies faces in the photo and then tries to match them to other faces you already have in your albums. This has allowed me to figure out who some obscure people were that I had no way to identify before! It even gives you a percentage for the match. An identical picture of the person is 100% and you can determine how good or bad of a match you want the filter to be. I found photos of my grandmother that were decades apart and where at around 65%. I found a picture of my grandmother's sister that had a 75% match to my grandmother! This is truly a fantastic tool.
2) Name Translations. There's a feature hiding inside FTB that lets you translate all the names in your database to another language. This might not be important to some people, but when your ancestors came from Eastern Europe and had Hebrew/Polish/Yiddish names - this can be the difference between no clue and an amazing discovery.
3) I really love how sleek the site is. You can see these guys have put a lot of thought and hard work into making this a truly easy experience for the users. One of my biggest gripes with Geni is that it is horribly slow. Just loading the homepage takes forever and a lot of times it just freezes on you. Another thing that drives me nuts is how slow it is to update when something happens. MyHeritage has great response times and looks great.
4) FTB and the site are both very easy to use to build a family tree. The reason I downloaded it in the first place was that it looked easy to use and offered a lot of features and functionality.
The only thing is - I haven't found anyone from my side of the family on MyHeritage. I originally found one of my father's second cousins, but he didn't really have a tree. I also found my wife's niece, but she only had herself and her parents. I know MyHeritage boasts 27M users and 300M people, but I am not sure how active these users are and how big their tress are. I mean, simple math will tell us that each user has 11 people in the tree. That's siblings, parents and grandparents.
The other problem is switching your family network to a different site. I have a lot of people in my tree on Geni. How do I make them all switch after trying hard to make them join Geni in the first place.
One of the reasons I have so many people in my Geni tree is that they have the excellent tree-merge feature. You find family members and invite them to your tree and voila, your trees are merged (with some merge issue resolution here and there). That's hard to beat.
I am glad that there is competition out there because in the end, we the consumers and end-users benefit from the resulting innovation. If you are new to genealogy and are just starting out with your research I would definitely recommend that you download FTB3 and start building you tree there. And publish it to a Basic MyHeritage website account which allows you to have up to 500 people in your tree for free. A Premium account allows up to 2500 and is only $1.95 per month right now (50% off deal). I think that's a great deal.
What are third/fourth/fifth cousins? They are descendants of your ancestors that you never knew you had. Almost every week I make contact with new distant cousins through Geni.com and I love it. So far I have discovered family in:
Argentina
Puerto Rico (previously living in Cuba)
Miami
Spain
Israel
There are several cousins who I know of that I have not been able to contact yet, but I know I will some day.
Here are a couple of stories for you:
1) One of my Kreplak cousins wrote this amazing story a while back when I just started my research:
12 years ago I went to the US after the army and I worked in a moving company. One Sunday I was at home and and a friend that owns a different moving company ask me to do him a favor and do a job for him. I went because he was my friend. When I got to the customer's house I was amazed to see it was a Kreplak family in Florida! It was unbelievable! When they opened the door I told them to look at my ID. They were in shock. We were relatives!
2) Here's another story that will amaze you:
My wife's uncle, Glenn, met a couple in Florida and the wife's maiden name turned out to be Hytowitz. Since it is such an uncommon name they tried to see how they were related but could not make the connection. A few weeks ago I got a response from another Hytowitz on Geni. I have about 8 Hytowitz families in my database and have not been able to link them all up yet. Turns out that this man is in one of these trees and he lives in one of the Atlanta suburbs. I gave him a call and we had a great conversation. Later that evening, I sent both him and uncle Glenn and e-mail to introduce them to each other. After a little discussion it turns out that the woman in Florida that known Glenn is a cousin of the man from Atlanta. The families have lost contact about a decade ago. What a small world.
3) You may have read my post detailing how my cousin from Argentina found the blog while Googling his surname. I have been able to contact him and get him on the Geni Tree. He had a few changes to make, like adding another brother! I also got in touch with third cousins in Spain, Miami and Barcelona through Geni. One thing I try to do every time I see that someone has joined the tree is to send them a quick message and welcome them to the tree and see if they have any questions.
Geni is a great site but I still have my issues with the speed of the site and the lack of an admin tool that will give me access to everything that is happening in my tree. I am also working with the folks at MyHeritage by giving them feedback on some of the features and functionality of their site. If you haven't checked it out, you should see how cool their photo tagging is and what celebrity you look like.
This is not a family history post. Just a little bit of techno-genea-babble.
So the news is out today that MyHeritage has bought Kindo and wants to become the "FaceBook of Families". So here's my short take on all this.
When I started my family tree, I found a free online application through a link at the Diaspora Museum. It was very basic, but it was enough for me to start from scratch. Then, a short while later, I ran into MyHeritage. I liked it because it had Hebrew support (at the time I thought it would help me translate Hebrew and Yiddish names to English, which it can't, so that feature was useless on my non-Hebrew computer), it looked like it had a lot of bells and whistles (I was a real newbie, so I had no idea what to even look for at that point), it had a consolidated research section and it was free. After I downloaded the free application and started playing with it I found out that it had a few limitations, with the biggest one being no ability to merge GEDCOM files.
I also found their cool website tree feature, their automated matching tool and Megadex search. But this is where things started to go downhill. I wanted to wipe out my tree and start fresh because I had so much new information to add. Since I couldn't merge files I started using RootsMagic. My thought was to create a consolidated GEDCOM and then upload it to MyHeritage. But then I found out that the free web tree can only have 1000 people in it. And I couldn't delete my original tree! I tried contacting support several times, but nobody ever got back to me. So I just stopped using the site altogether.
And then I found Geni and loaded my entire GEDCOM into it (with over 9000 people at this point). And I invited everyone to participate. And they did. So at this point, switching back to MyHeritage is just plain not going to happen. I also found a bunch of relatives on Geni and we were able to easily merge our trees.
I looked at the MyHeritage site again today after a long break and found a "delete tree" button that actually worked. I also saw that their fancy photo matching feature is only available to Gold and Platinum accounts, so I guess I won't be using that any time soon. What I did instead is create a new tree that has about 900+ people in it and is based on descendants of 6 generations of my daughter's ancestors. This will allow me to do some free matching as well as do some research on the MyHeritage site. When I'm done with these 900 I will delete the tree and load additional people to research and try to match.
I understand that MyHeritage has to have a business model and I wonder how many of their 25 million members are actually active or have a tree that is larger than 1000 people (most trees I see have only three people in them, I'm not even kidding). If the revenue from larger sites is not substantial and there are other free tools out there like Geni, I suggest MyHeritage find other business models instead of their current one. Buying other companies and spending money on R&D without a revenue stream is a great way to go broke.
I will still use MyHeritage and I am sad to not be able to support and Israeli start-up, but there are better free tools out there. For now.
UPDATE: I just thought of a couple of other things. First, I mentioned how bad the support sucked at MyHeritage when I was trying to delete my tree. On the opposite side of the spectrum I have to commend Geni support for being quick to respond. They didn't solve the problem, but at least they got back to me. Which brings me to two interesting problems I found and one suggestion:
1) If you try to send too many messages, they will not get delivered. Instead they will get stuck in some mysterious queue and not get unstuck until someone from support does it manually. This happened when I ran a search for some surnames and tried to contact multiple people. And it happened more than once. At least support fixed it right away. They also told me to send less messages or send them slower. Hmmm.... Interesting answer.
2) Merging trees is not as easy as you might think. If someone has a tree already and you send them an invite to join your tree the trees will merge. Then you can go about sorting out the discrepancies and deciding what information stays. But what happens if you want to merge things by yourself? Let's say you just added a huge GEDCOM to your tree, how does that work? Well, you need to create a second account, give it some other e-mail that is not in use at Geni, load your GEDCOM and invite yourself to merge. Kind of roundabout, but it works. I tried it.
3) If they could add a chat function between online users, that would be awesome.
