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We’d like to mention some of the core differences between Dynastree and MyHeritage.com to ease the transition for you. The MyHeritage.com platform will not integrate the exact same features that Dynastree had. However the technical team from MyHeritage is currently working day and night on details of the merger, is fixing smaller and bigger problems that you have reported, is integrating further features from Dynastree and does everything to help you feel at home on your new family site on MyHeritage.com. A move of 11 million people and 100 million profiles isnt that easy, just imagine the whole of New York City and Washington would move at the same time We do our best and are happy that besides some smaller worries most things work quite smoothly. Thanks again for your patience with us in the process!

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Our goal for the merger is to bring the best of both worlds together in one platform. The popular family crest creator for example is the first feature that has been moved from Dynastree to MyHeritage.com. Read more about it on the MyHeritage blog, check it out for yourself and send in your family crest to win a free year of Premium! Several other Dynastree features will follow, some smaller and some bigger ones, depending on how important they are and which ones you need the most. Small but very important for many German and Spanish users for example was the way MyHeritage treats surnames of women. Based on the anglosaxon habits we so far assumed the husbands surname to be the wife’s surname after marriage, especially for most of the ancestors a helpful one, but in other cultures and modern times we needed to add the option to switch that off and have added a whole set of culture-specific defaults for names that will help you add people to your tree.

Another Dynastree feature that will come in the next couple of weeks is the poster printing. On MyHeritage.com you can print your tree and generate PDF if you click on ‘family tree’ > ‘print charts’ – the free offline software Family Tree Builder gives you even more settings to choose from. Family Tree Builder also has very rich maps, similar to the ones on Dynastree, but with many more features to display location data in your whole family or parts of your family or migrations during the life of one of your ancestors. The maps are not yet on MyHeritage.com, but that will change in the next months and we’ll let you know when we’re there.

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The merging of family trees as it was possible on Dynastree so far is not possible on MyHeritage.com. We don’t try to merge all family trees of the world into one, while overwriting different versions of different researchers into one. Every users keeps full control over his data and version of the research. Our Smart Matches help to find other people researching the same ancestors and help you to exchange information with them, but you can decide what to take and what to leave. We are also working on a brand new version of our Smart Matches that should be ready some time later this year, so stay tuned.

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Another difference to Dynastree is the management of unclaimed profiles. On Dynastree every profile had a manager, which initially was the person who created the profile. On MyHeritage this concept doesnt exist and the rights management is build around webmasters, members and visitors to family sites. The webmaster(s) of a site can decide who has access to certain features of the family site and who doesn’t. In any case, none of the data about living people on MyHeritage is open to the public, you can only see it if you are member of the family site and logged in with your details.

MyHeritage.com does not support name days or special wedding anniversaries like a “golden wedding” or the like.

Let’s get to some of the advantages of MyHeritage that you’ll be able to enjoy now:
First of all there is financial stability: MyHeritage.com is profitable, has received more than 24 million US Dollars in investment (6 times more than Dynastree) and is supported by some of the best investors in Europe: ‘Accel Partners’ and ‘Index Ventures’, the investors of Facebook and Skype. MyHeritage is an established company that will treat your information responsibly and is a great long-term steward for research data.
With more than 35 supported languages (compared to 10 on Dynastree) we ensure that all your relatives can join in, no matter how distant they are and what languages they know. Through the merger MyHeritage has a significantly bigger team so we will be able to offer you new features and improvements on a regular basis.

The ‘Smart Matches’ work very reliably and are based on a huge database, that is several times the size of the one at Dynastree. That makes it even easier for you to find relatives that you hadnt heard about and grow your family tree further.
The photo features on MyHeritage.com are a class of their own: besides usual uploads, you can upload via email, mobile phone, import from facebook and share everything with your relatives. The state-of-the-art face recognition technology helps you to mark people on photos and to the animated slideshows put your relatives in the spotlight. You can also upload documents and videos and like documents from your family history research or moving images of your little cousin eating chocolate cake.

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The calendar is a great feature as well and much ahead of what you know from Dynastree. Finally you can enter manual events, like family reunions, birthday parties or organise a cinema evening with your siblings or cousins – MyHeritage even offers you to directly send invitations for those events. Besides we remind you of birthdays, anniversaries and even death anniversaries or holidays, according to your needs.

You might also like the free offline software ‘Family Tree Builder’, a professional and easy-to-use genealogy suite with a lot of additional features. And compared to the “Home Edition” it is fully integrated with your family site at MyHeritage.com. Family Tree Builder is the expert tool to manage your genealogy data and media, offers detailed reports and charts and with more than 9 million downloads it is one of the most popular genealogy programs out there. You can find more information and download the software here.

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Finally we don’t want to forget to mention that Premium memberships on MyHeritage are valid for all relatives – instead of only for one user like on Dynastree. This helps you to save money and is especially great for the younger genealogists among you that can find a sponsor among their older uncles to get full access to all Premium features.

We hope to have shown that the most important things remain the same – the security of your data, good support and an easy-to-use interface – and there are a lot of other things around it that are new and changing. Not everything will become better but most of the things! You can be sure that we are working hard for you and remain at your disposal just email us on support@myheritage.com with any questions or feedback.

Macek discovered his interest in mythology at the age of 15 and started to collect and sort family trees of antique heroes. He is particularly proud of his directory of the nymphs, Zeus’ daughters.

Source: Link

Due to technical maintenance work, dynastree will be offline tomorrow (Jan 6th) from 8.30 am and 9.30 am CET. We will probably have to take the blog and the forum offline till noon (CET).

The dynastree Team

1. 1. itsourtree.com

2. The "Granite Mountain" in Utah.

The Church of the Latter Day Saints has build a large vault about 600 feet into the mountain. It contains 2.4 million rolls of microfilm and 1 million microfiche of genealogical information, among these the names of 3 billion people. The environment in the vault has the perfect atmosphere and temperature for the storage of the data, the entrance door weighs 14 tons. The LDS believe that after death, everyone will meet his/her ancestors and that is why genealogy is such an important issue for the Mormonists. For more information on the vault, click here or here.

One year ago, we launched the Portuguese version of our site. Parabéns or Happy Birthday meusparentes.com.pt.

As a birthday present, we gave the portuguese site a brandnew forum including a new structure. We’ll update the English forum soon, too and add a new structure. If you’re thinking of possible categories you’d like us to add to the new forum, please write them in this post’s comments.

We’ll keep you posted on the server’s status and announce it here on the blog as soon as the connection is up again.

*UPDATE*: The photo servers are back on-line, please log out and log in again to see the photos and to be able to upload new images.

"Trace a line back 600 years and what you have is 16 million ancestors. Go back 80 generations and the figure rises to a trillion trillion (which is actually greater than the total number of people who’ve ever lived, but that’s maths for you).

The US National Centre for Biotechnology Information puts it as bluntly as it gets by pointing out that, if you trace the line back far enough, every single human on the planet would eventually be shown to be related."

Wouldn’t it be great to see your family relation to all your ancestors? It’ll probably take some time to add all these ancestors, and some information may be lost, but if you add as many relatives and ancestors as you can and invite all relatives you know, you’ll find out quite a lot about your ancestors (one of the largest trees in our database has more than 23,000 profiles!).