* news item linking Calico Pie and MyHeritage

[jimlad68]

Just noticed this http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... HMdc4tv74Y which is to be expected with FHV6 imminent.

I have had little experience of MyHeritage before but have a contact who shares their tree with me and the site seems OK to manouver and download data from. The gripes I have seen are poor/slow Help and support, privacy and difficulty in stopping subscription payments, but that can be common for many sites. (When possible I always use easily cancellable Bank Account Direct Debits rather than credit card for subscription type things).

[AdrianBruce]

So long as it has absolutely nothing to do with GENI.COM, which, last I heard, was part of the MyHeritage family, and has appalling reports.

[jimlad68]

Very interesting; the parent co MyHeritage gets quite good reviews here:
http://www.gensoftreviews.com/?p=880&s= ... ype=&sort=
yet the same review site gives its child co (according to wiki, not always correct) quite bad ones here:
http://www.gensoftreviews.com/?p=528

I must say I always treat reviews with a large pinch of salt (something the size of the Cheshire reserves), but I find they often point to facets that you might, or might not, be concerned about that you can look into further.

[AdrianBruce]

Just in case anyone misunderstands - my concerns are not to do with MyHeritage (the data provider site, shall we say) but with Geni.com, the tree site.

MyHeritage seems to be making a play for number 3 data provider in the USA behind Ancestry & FamilySearch. My impression is that operation does seem to be making some headway, at least among opinion formers like the bloggers (they sponsor Dick Eastman's newsletter, for instance).

Geni.com was originally wholly separate but, some years ago, was bought by MyHeritage (this is all from potentially fallible memory). It is one of those sites that does not provide researchers with their own trees, under their own control, but provides everyone with fully open access to one single area - the ultimate aim would be one tree being worked on by everyone in collaboration and each person in the data appearing only once. An aim, not a specific and realistic objective. There are, shall we say, many issues associated with such a tree (of which FamilySearch FamilyTree is another) and they get known as "One Tree to Rule Them All" or Borg-Trees, depending on your favourite fantasy.

Geni.com has its defenders - the GenSoftReviews site quotes at least one such. Unfortunately, all too often, such defenders' arguments summarise as "You complainers are all too stupid to understand how to use this site". To which my response would be - "So who's teaching them? Who's supposed to be teaching them?"

So I think you can see where my concerns lie.

[Jane]

The My Heritage link up is completely optional on FH6, when you install you can turn it off or try it and turn it on and off as you want.

My understanding is unless you choose other wise no identifiable data is stored on the My Heritage servers it's just sent for matching purposes.

Once the program is released everyone will be able to read the Terms and Conditions and decide if the option is for them or just turn it off.

[jimlad68]

MyHeritage have been busy, link from the aforementioned MyHeritage sponsored Dick Eastman:
http://blog.eogn.com/2014/11/25/a-major ... databases/

Same link with Rootsmagic program as FH.

Nice coincidence for them that RM and FH both have new releases at the same time.

Can't say I have used this matching technology much, in the past I have found global searches just as good and easier to "monitor" in terms of where I have or haven't looked. Suppose I should try again, new algorithms might be better and save some time.

[AdrianBruce]

... My understanding is unless you choose other wise no identifiable data is stored on the My Heritage servers it's just sent for matching purposes. ...

Thanks Jane - that sounds good to me. The Dick Eastman blog that Jim links to, contains both the RootsMagic and Family Historian press releases. Interestingly the RM release does explicitly say "Information sent by RootsMagic to MyHeritage for matching is never collected or shared, and is deleted after matching to ensure the complete privacy of RootsMagic users and their data." I presume the same applies (as you suggest) to FH.

I know some people dislike record hinting / matching - I did, always saying, "I can find stuff better than software." Then Ancestry's hints found me some previously unknown data about my GG Aunt (the person who unwittingly got me into family history) - after that, I was compelled to realise there might be something in it after all. It even (much later) directed me to the fate of my 4G GM who I'd never been able to trace after the death of my 4G GF. (And a right Victorian melodrama that turned out to be!)

[jmurphy]

You can probably guess that I've just read Dick Eastman's column -- so I came here to ask who has used MyHeritage lately.

Back in 2006 when I was first starting, I experimented with several sites and programs before settling on Family Historian. I found a cheap copy of FamilyTreeMaker and bought it for the free sub to Ancestry that came with it. I quickly ditched that in favor of using Ancestral Quest, which had some built-in search features. I also used a shareware program called 'ancestor search' (I can't spell the German name; that's a translation) which searched FamilySearch and a couple of other sites for you, and allowed you to triage your finds by marking them "important" "possibly important" and "not important").

I particularly like the description of "Borg trees". It's a good metaphor for the business plan of several of these companies. Someone starts a company, goes along for a while, eventually along comes the bigger company, and eats up the smaller one. Sometimes the good ideas of the smaller companies are assimilated into the larger one, and sometimes they are discarded (e.g. Ancestry rendering Genealogy.com's GenForums mute).

I had that free year of Ancestry, but I wanted to see what else was out there, so I signed up for the then-new World Vital Records, partly lured by the deal to get a copy of Ancestral Quest along with my sub. WVR has has since been absorbed into the My Heritage nexus (or transmogrified into it). It was started by a former Ancestry refugee and has added / absorbed many features over the years to become more Ancestry-like. In those early days, it didn't have a difference between a US sub and a World sub, and I used it to get UK Census records, which it got through a partnership with Find My Past. They also used to have a tempting feature of offering every new database added to their collection free for its first 10 days on the site; that too changed once the company had grown some more. When they split the subs up into World and US subs, I dropped them; I had reached a plateau in my UK research, and had exhausted most of their collection.

Another site which My Heritage absorbed was GenCircles, which is where the SmartMatching came from. Before being sucked up by MyHeritage, GenCircles was purchased by another company, and the software FamilyTreeLegends was needed to integrate with the desktop. The few matches I found via this mechanism were from a user who had contributed his GEDCOM file widely over the net -- I found multiple copies of his data via GenCircles, at FamilySearch, at RootsWeb -- you get the idea. I think it's pretty safe to say I would have found his file without GenCircles.

Now Find My Past is making a big push at the US market. They have eaten British Origins and are incorporating their data sets like the Devon Wills Index. They have recently added a family tree system and the ability to attach records to one's tree. Unlike Ancestry, your tree is private by default. Unlike Ancestry, they make it easy for you to not renew your subscription, and they give loyalty discounts. Once they get the same depth of record coverage, watch out Ancestry.

I've recently learned some things about Ancestry's hint system that I didn't know before. When I first started putting up private trees as 'flypaper' for hints, I was hoping that the hints would alert me to hits in the newly-added collections. This worked spectacularly once, for a new collection of delayed birth records that I had not been aware of. But more recently, in some of her videos, Crista Cowan has explained that the Ancestry Hints are designed on purpose to search the most popular collections, which means that they are most likely to hint at the things I could easily find for myself, and not the smaller, more obscure collections that I was hoping it would alert me to, like the delayed birth records.

However, blogger Randy Seaver has decoded the URL that results when you look at your Ancestry hints, and has figured out how to filter the hints by a specific record collection, so you can look at only the hints from one database at a time. This makes the hint engine go out and take a fresh look at the data, and makes it much easier to do cross-vendor searching (e.g. looking for all the hints for FreeBMD, which mask the location if you don't have a World sub, on FreeBMD itself). Knowing Randy's hack gets around the "low hanging fruit" aspect of Ancestry's hint system and makes it more valuable, although the other disadvantages remain -- aside from weighting too-heavily by name, another annoyance is that it will sometimes match a sibling in a census record when you have already attached that census to a person.

Why do we need hint searching for "low hanging fruit" when we can search for it ourselves? People like Randy Seaver have much bigger databases, and thus way more hints, than I have -- it takes a long time to search for everyone, even if it's only the easy bits. I can understand that -- obviously the number of people I'm looking for now is much larger than what it was in late 2006, when I foolishly thought that the trial version of Ancestral Quest, which would hold 100 people, would be plenty big enough for the one little Family Archive / Scrapbook project I had planned to do with it.

The name of the game seems to be integrating our desktop software with these big vendors. If I were ruler of the universe, I would rather have seen Family Historian team up with Find My Past; if I have to add another sub, or dump Ancestry for something else, I would much rather have Find My Past than My Heritage, given my previous experiences. But I'll be still be interested to see what the My Heritage matches pull up now.

My ultimate rule for deciding what vendor to purchase a sub for is their depth of records. If they don't have the records I need, there's no point in paying for access. It doesn't matter how fancy the matching algorithm is if there is nothing to match. So perhaps having the built-in matching will allow me to see if it's really useful to pay for MyHeritage, or not.

[jimlad68]

Well, that was a very interesting history lesson, probably a common theme in many business areas.

I found your comments re FMP and Ancestry reversing roles very interesting, I have recently been thinking that myself and it reiterates the idea that once a good provider, not always so, and vice versa (how many restaurants do you return to only to be disappointed). When FMP first came on the scene with their highjacking of the 1911 UK census, they obviously treated it as a "cash cow" and upset many people in the process (the Scottish government still seem to treat their data that way, but we can't blame Brightsolid for that), I think they have learned their lesson, especially in the USA market where they don't mind paying, but expect a lot for their money. As time has gone by, I have found FMP customer service greatly improved.

Although I still very much like Ancestry they in turn seem to have been carpet bagged and are not a cheap option, their forrays in to family tree programs both online and PC make me despair. Hence, (together with being in IT since 1970), my mantra: "BACK IT UP" preferably offsite and make it "PORTABLE", one of the reasons I chose FH. Better a bad common language, than not being able to talk to anyone.

[Jane]

If anyone wants to see the Data Policy for the My Heritage / FH cross over you can check it out at http://bit.ly/fhmhpol

[jmurphy]

My history is incomplete (I forgot Ancestry's takeover of Rootsweb, which caused a lot of societies to pull their data off Rootsweb in protest. I also may have remembered some events out of order. Ancestry's own corporate timeline is here:
http://corporate.ancestry.com/about-anc ... y-history/

There is a Wikipedia with a hidden timeline of the FTM software here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry.com

Look for the section which says:

FTM version history

Please press show for more information on past versions.
[show] Family Tree Maker version history

I purchased FTM 2006 on clearance in Fall of 2006, around the time that FTM 16 was being released.

Meanwhile:

Dick Eastman's review from 2005 of Family Tree Legends:
http://eogn.typepad.com/eastmans_online ... e_leg.html

FamilyLink / World Vital Records started in 2006:
http://www.familylink.com/aboutus.aspx

According to Tamura Jones' blog, My Heritage bought Pearl Street Software, the creators of Family Tree Legends and the GenCircles site, in 2007:
http://www.tamurajones.net/Discontinued ... ware.xhtml

The developer who created GenCircles joined FamilyLink in 2009:
http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/2009/03/form ... rcles.html

MyHeritage acquired World Vital Records and their site FamilyLink in 2011:
http://blog.myheritage.com/2011/11/myhe ... cords-com/

They also bought other companies like BackupMyTree:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... Ik6O3v0np8

Note that BackupMyTree was another company created by Cliff Shaw, the creator of GenCircles and said to be the founder of GenForum. He also founded Mocavo, which has recently been purchased by Find My Past.

Movaco has been roundly criticized for scraping other people's web content (as has Ancestry).

World Vital Records was founded by an ex-Ancestry employee.

I see the same players founding sites, selling them, creating something else, then selling that, too. If we created a 'family tree' of all the people involved in all these sales and acquisitions, there are very few people involved. It's no wonder there isn't any real innovation in the industy. It's not unlike the book industry used to be, especially the science fiction imprints. You could practically trace the careers of certain editors by seeing which publisher had reprinted their favorite books.

[jimlad68]

Once again an interesting history + genealogy of the genealogy industry. If someone were inclined I'm sure they could use FH to create a tree, it would be a good test to see if FH could cope with multiple incest. ,. Mind, once again I'm sure it is the same in many business areas.

[makfai]

The name of the game seems to be integrating our desktop software with these big vendors. If I were ruler of the universe, I would rather have seen Family Historian team up with Find My Past; if I have to add another sub, or dump Ancestry for something else, I would much rather have Find My Past than My Heritage, given my previous experiences

I could not agree more but presumably FH gets something from MH which the opposition does not match!

[jmurphy]

I thought this blog post from Australia's Gould Genealogy might be of interest:

Who Owns What in the Genealogy World?

[Johnr65]

As Calico Pie is a UK based program, I wonder why they didn't use FMP or GenesReunited to team up with rather than MyHeritage which is quite expensive compared with the latter? I for one dont't like MH -they're always badgering you to join!

[gsward]

IMO seems a mistake for Calico Pie to link with My Heritage, unless they are planning to acquire FMP (DC Thomson)?