MyHeritage Updates

MyHeritage has been busy adding lots of new features over the past months, and announced some additional new features and some coming ones at RootsTech this year.

New Releases

MyHeritage have introduced a new profile page with hints directly on it. This makes it easier to work within the profile and not have to leave it.

You will see on the image above that the profile now has a number of tabs across the top (Details, Matches, Biography, Photos, Sources). The Biography tab shows you a narrative version of the subject’s life, or if you chose “Create AI Biography” you can generate a more detailed biography based on information in your tree. This biography, if the appropriate option is selected, also pulls out information from other trees, and sources, as well as including Historical Context and name origins. If there are photos attached to the person’s profile they are included in the AI Biography.

Person with only a standard biography

Person with AI Biography (note scroll bar to show
rest of AI Biography)

My feeling about this biography is that it is a good starting point for a person, though I would probably build on it from there. But it’s certainly better than the stilted narrative that comes from my family history program.

RootsTech also saw the announcement of OldNews.com, a new Historical Newspapers site. It includes newspapers from USA, UK, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Czechia, and will soon include NZ papers.

The front page indicates that you can browse the publications, but I couldn’t find how to do so. The filters available to restrict the results are publication year or publication date, publication place (country level only) and publication name. But there is no drop-down or other method of finding what publications are available. It would be nice to have the option of filtering by article type, as many other newspaper sites allow, and to have options to sort the results. Playing around, it seems that the newspapers included the UK are limited to Gazettes at the moment, but more newspapers will be added to over time.

OldNews will be available either through its own subscription, or through an “Omni” MyHeritage subscription. The Omni subscription will include all newspapers, a complete subscription to MyHeritage, access to Geni Pro, a one year subscription to Legacy Family Tree webinars, unlimited photo scanning on reimagine app (and soon on the MyHeritage App). It will be priced at 50% of what it would cost to purchase all of these.

You are now also able to share DNA results with a collaborator. The introduction of two-factor authentication (necessitated by the 23andMe breach) made it difficult for people to share passwords with others to view DNA results. Not that anyone should have been sharing passwords anyway. More details are available here.

Coming Soon

We also got some hints of things that are coming soon: MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA collaboration, getting DNA from artifacts like stamps, and a major DNA ethnicity update which will give many more ethnicity groups.