You’ve probably done your first steps on MyHeritage.com already and noticed some things that work differently.

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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.

In 1990, the UN made October 1st the International Day of Older Persons. 50 years from now, the number of older persons will nearly quadruple, growing from about 600 million to almost 2 billion people. The world grows older and everyone should be aware of this fact. So, if you haven’t already done it, speak with your elderly relatives about your family. They probably know a lot about the past and past generations. If you don’t think you can invite them to your family tree, take our family questionnaire with you to take down notes and enter the data yourself. Your children will appreciate your efforts!

Of course, you can’t sit in front of your computer all day adding information to your family tree on itsourtree.com. There are lots of interesting and helpful books on genealogy out there that can be complementary tools for your genealogical research. Strolling around Amazon may be fun but specialized bookstores always add to your search’s efficiency. RootsBooks.com (RootsBooks.co.uk for all english(wo)men among us) has to offer a lot of literature and software, especially matching genealogists’ needs. Basically, it’s just a filtered Amazon that Dick Eastman has set up, but the concentration on genealogy-related topics can help to find interesting results!

You’ve got your own blog or homepage and would like to show itsourtree.com on your site and recommend it to others? Why don’t you use the banner below to show your love!

It’s really easy: simply download the .zip file below to your computer and show the world where you’re tracing your roots. In the file, you find the Wordpress-Code and the HTML code for your homepage.

itsourtree-banner_468×60_en.zip

During the week from 9:00 am to 18:00 pm (Central European Time), the Itsourtree.com’s team is engaged in answering all your e-mails and providing the best costumer support you can get. We do know that e-mails can be once in a while a bit impersonal. Nevertheless, considering the modern times and given the amount requests we receive everyday, the e-mail is the only tool we have that can cope with this reality.  For those who can’t deal with the impersonality of e-mails and the cybernetic environment, we are experimenting the skype phone.  You may reach us under our contact page.  “Hear ya!!!”

The origin of names has lots to do with the genealogical research. Afterall, you can only track back a relative through it’s name, be it first or last name. Some face the problem that names develop and change their spelling throughout the centuries in a way that they are almost not identifiable anymore. It’s the case of Brilhador which the original writing was Briatore. In this case you can perhaps explain the origin and developement. More mysterious are last names such as Gotobed, Brushit and Tellme. Can you explain those or you also think it’s only the product of human creativity?

If you thought you had seen everything, I think we found something new for our users to go deep into. Have you ever heard of a project called WorldGenWeb? We haven’t either until today. This project is volunteer based and it’s goal is making available all kinds of historical and genealogical records for free in the internet. In every continent there is already a respectable database for research. Sometimes it isn’t that bad not being the first to know. Now you have enough material to go through. Enjoy!

The chinese athletes are dominating the olympic games. But can you remember the names of the male winners for the 3m springboard synchronized?

To english speakers it’s often hard to remember the names of chinese athletes.

But there is a hint:

Almost 85% of the chinese population can be listed under only 100 different surnames.

In other words, that means that there are 98 million Wangs and almost the same amount of chinese named Zhang or Li. The reason behind the small number of surnames can be found in the country’s history. The origin of surnames in the chinese culture derives from totems and tribal motives and therefore many families are named after plants or animals.  Different from western cultures, in China the surname is spoken always before the name itself.

So in order to identify one Zhang among the milions of other Zhangs, the chinese make use of their creativity to choose first names. It’s common that the parents choose the kids’ names and because of that some chinese are named Qian Quian (money, money) or also recently Aoyun (Olympic Games).

The first names are a reflection of the country’s cultural development and after 40 years of revolution, one shouldn’t be surprised to meet in the streets people named Soldier, Construction or Red!

By the way, the chinese athletes for the springboard synchronized are Wang Feng and Qin Kai

Today, we’ve got a surf tip for all those among you who are interested in learning more about genealogy. Google (known for its almost omniscient web search) recently launched a new feature: searchable book scans. Older books and pamphlets are even completely searchable, newer ones are available as previews. This powerful online library includes a lot of genealogy-related books as well and that’s what makes it interesting for us: if you type in “genealogy“, google comes up with about 43,700 results. Of course, we haven’t read all of them, but some are really worth a look.

As our goal is to bring families closer together, we’ve got a new feature for you: You can now send messages directly by clicking on the little green envelope button in an active person’s profile in the tree.

Additionally, this little marker on the profiles shows you which profiles are active and which not. The ability to send messages to all your relatives without having to know all the email addresses makes your tree a powerful communication tool. So, the more relatives you invite the better…

By the way: the button can also be found in the active person’s profile.