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.
