MyHeritage Book Matching: Automated Alerts for Ancestor Names

myheritage book matching iconA new search technology is here: MyHeritage Book Matching automates the process of connecting digital book content to users’ family trees.

It used to be that our only option for finding our relatives mentioned in old family histories, county histories and other books was pretty slow. We’d head to a library, thumb through indexes and skim through likely-looking books, hoping we’d spot a familiar surname.

Google Books, the Internet Archive, FamilySearch’s Digital Books and other major digital archives have reduced the number of books we have to page through manually. Now there’s one more tool out there for digital book searching: MyHeritage Book Matching.

This new technology “automatically finds matches for people in your family tree on MyHeritage in [their] vast collection of 450,000 digitized historical books,” says a MyHeritage press release. That’s 91 million pages—and counting, because they have 50 curators out there aiming to add hundreds of millions of pages of digitized books each year. Right now they just have English-language books but they’re working to expand that.

MyHeritage Book Matching uses what they call “full semantic text analysis” to compare digital book content with the people in your family trees. In everyday terms, it means they’re matching both the names and locations on users’ family trees with book content.

The nice thing about this technology is that it’s automated. Like the main Record Matching and Newspaper Matching features on MyHeritage, the site constantly combs new content and alerts users when possibilities are found. It’s analogous to having Google Alerts for books that are digitized on MyHeritage. (If you don’t know about Google Alerts, the automated Google searching you can set up for your genealogy, click here to learn more.)

So far on my MyHeritage tree, I’ve had 6 matches from Book Matching. All appear relevant, though I haven’t dug into them to confirm. My favorite is one that mentions an ancestor and all her siblings as charter members of the Mt. Vernon Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Missouri:myheritage book matching 2

What a great lead–I could jump on this to look for those church records and see what else they can tell me about the Weedin family. I found a picture of another ancestor in a church biographical collection; a family history book I didn’t have; and another ancestor’s name in a state genealogical magazine.

Do you have to have a paid subscription at MyHeritage to use these? Yes and no. Book Matches are generated automatically for any family tree built on the website or imported into it. But a data subscription, which runs about $10 a month, is required to actually view your Book Matches. Click here to learn more about subscribing to MyHeritage, which is a sponsor of the free Genealogy Gems podcast.

More Gems on Digital Books for Genealogy

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New FindMyPast Hints Help Find Records

FindMyPast, the genealogy website best known for its mega-collections of U.K. historical records, recently added a hinting feature to the family trees FindMyPast hinting 2 online family treescomponent of its website.

According to a press release, “Once you start to add to your family tree, Hints will sift through 755 million of our birth, baptism, marriage, divorce, death and burial records to identify matches between them and the people on your tree, providing you with historical records and potential new relatives from our collections.” Hints do not search other trees, as FindMyPast does not have publicly-searchable trees.

Now when you look at your tree, you’ll see little numbers appear next to individual profiles when hints are available. You can review buy nebuliser medication online hints at your leisure and extract facts from them to add to ancestral profiles.

FindMyPast Hints are available to all users but are still in the beta testing stage. “You can expect a lot more from Hints in 2015, including Hints on census records and other collections. By reviewing all of your Hints, you’ll be helping us to ensure that our process continues to improve.”

 

 

Click here to learn about our favorite collection at FindMyPast: PERSI, the Periodical Source Index. It’s not just an index any more: FindMyPast has started adding digitized articles to the thousands of article titles indexed in this amazing database of genealogical and historical articles in journals and periodicals.

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