MyHeritage Website

I mentioned that I received my first issue of Internet Genealogy yesterday. There was an article about the My Heritage site written by Lisa A. Alzo, so I decided to take a look...and was I impressed!

The first part is just a fun area: the Face Recognition program. I uploaded up a photo of myself, and received a list of celebrities that are my look-alikes, among which was Annette Bening, Joan Collins, and Jesse McCartney (the last brought forth a few hysterical giggles from my teenagers).

The second part of the site has a free downloadable family tree software program, plus a beta program for creating your own family tree pages online.

I was most impressed with the "Research" portion of the site (accessed through the orange menu bars at the top of the page). It claims to have the "most powerful genealogy search engine on the planet," and I was not disappointed! I ran some of my more unusual surnames through the search engine, and checked off some of the alternate spellings using the Megadex feature. I got some terrific hits, and discovered many genealogy websites I never knew existed! The one that I think will prove most helpful is Odessa: A German - Russian Genealogical Library. I don't even have German - Russian ancestry, but my sister's children do, on their father's side. I e-mailed a link to the Odessa page to my sister, and I hope that she will be able to break through a lot of brick walls with this resource!

P.S. WhenI originally published this post over at my old blog site,

Cameron left the following comment on December 19, 2006:

This site is really good. I'm not too interested in the face thing, but the database search is a great tool for finding sources you didn't even know existed. The number of hits this search engine locates is almost overwhelming. It certainly made its way onto my "A" list.