My heritage: The Family Friendly Search Engine

Guest Post by Nick Capallero

Anyone involved in genealogical research knows about the difficulty in tracking long lost family members, in obtaining and organizing official records and placing them in an easy-to-use family tree for all the family. Although nowadays one can get help online, a good and trustworthy genealogy research tool, specializing in finding ancestors and advancing our family research, is essential.

My Heritage was one of the first sites totally geared towards helping its users easily create and access their family trees online, and even create a community where family members can participate and help out too. Another tool available at My Heritage is a “record family engine” which searches across more than 10 billion records, and so far it is the most extensive genealogy searches available for ancestry research online. And best of all: it is free. Since their release of version 2.0, My Heritage has added hundreds of new genealogy database platforms which have given it a totally new and larger scope to its search capability.

This is how to use it: In the genealogical research form, type in the last name you are researching – if you don’t know the exact spelling or name, enter a combination of a first name and last name. The tool then searches for it in 1,400 genealogy databases and related Websites. This is a much more focused search than the ones carried out by more general search engines like Google and Yahoo. Searches can look for an exact spelling, or multiple spelling variations (called Megadex). Attention that the research tool will look for results in thousands of genealogy database and archives, so it may take several minutes before you can see the results on the screen. This search engine is particularly useful if you are researching a rare last name, or an uncommon combination of a first name and surname.

There are many other sites on the Internet for genealogy, My Heritage is not alone, but on My Heritage users can count on a reliable technical support team and easy availability of information.