(click on the image to enlarge)

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!

(click on the image to enlarge)

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.

(click on the image to enlarge)

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.

(click on the image to enlarge)

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.

(click on the image to enlarge)

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.

(click on the image to enlarge)

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.

The Kennedy family became very influential in U.S. politics during the 2oth century. Ted Kennedy’s father was the grandson of an Irish immigrant, and served as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The height of the family’s political influence had probably been reached when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the second oldest of the 9 siblings, became the 35th President of the United States in 1960.  Triumph and tragedy were never far from one another in the Kennedy family: John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert (who served as attorney general and later as senator) were both killed by assassins, and Ted Kennedy himself survived a plane crash in 1964, which caused permanent problems in back and neck. Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver (born as the 5th child), who founded the Special Olympics, had just died two weeks before Edward Kennedy.

The story of the Kennedy family tree is truly remarkable.

dynastree’s Turkish version, akrabaonline, will be launched tomorrow! We are happy about this expansion and the extended possibilities it offers to Turkish-speaking people around the world. On the occasion of these exciting news, this week’s poll question appeals to Turks and those of Turkish descent.

Today, we celebrate dynastree’s 2nd birthday! We are proud of the great success and happy about the fact that dynastree has been growing constantly, there are more than 9 million members signed up, and over 90 million profiles have been added so far. We would like to thank all our users for joining dynastree and all their input and support.

From now on, dynastree is also present on Facebook and Twitter, check it out!

Have a nice Friday and a relaxing weekend everyone!

The help section has now completely been translated to Spanish and Portuguese, and some bugs have been fixed.
To install the new version, download the file via the link above, and then double-click it and follow the instructions.
A complete manual for the program is included under “Help”.

dynastree Home Edition is designed for creating a family tree offline, and can alsobe used to edit back-ups of family  trees exported from the dynastree website. It allows for editing a host of different file formats, e.g. the popular and widespread GEDCOM format (.ged),  but also .csv, and .xml.

Please visit our Infocenter to find out more.

Mr. Tanabe was listed as the world’s oldest man in the Guiness Book of World Records since 2007, he is succeeded by British veteran Henry Allingham who is also 113 years old. Mr. Allingham is also the last surviving founder of the Royal Airforce, the last of two British survivors of the First World War, and also the last man to have witnessed the Battle of Jutland.

Asked for the secret to a long life on his last birthday in September, Mr. Tanabe gave the advice not to drink or smoke. He was known to get up at half past five every morning, drink a glass of milk every day, and read the newspaper every morning.  The Japanese are known for their longevity, the life expectancy is among the world’s highest – almost 86 years for women, and 79 for men. According to recent inquiries, more than 36,000 Japanese are more than a hundred years old. A reason often cited is the very healthy traditional diet including a lot of seafood and rice – Mr. Tanabe’s favorite dishes were fried shrimp and Japanese miso soup with clams.

Quite the opposite applies to Mr. Allingham: the Briton once humorously cited “cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women” as beneficial to his high age.

The original idea for a project of statistics in real time has been started by a team of experts and researchers who plan to add the largest number of people in statistics or even to create a tool to measure the planet’s “pulse”.
These are todays statistics of the world population:

WorldOMeter’s data is collected from various organizations and institutions as well as from statistics from around the world. The meter of statistics in real time is based on algorithms developed by the developers of the project, according to their forecasts on the evolution of different parameters.

The Russian platform will be called semyaonline.ru (Family Online) or семьяонлайн.ру in Cyrillic. Russian will be our 9th language and the 13th country version. The site will most likely be ready for launch by the end of January/at the beginning of Febuary, you can then finally invite all those Russian relatives to your family tree who cannot speak any of our other languages. Until then, you can follow our Russian blog and keep an eye on what our new colleague Anna is doing…

In the first step you set the central person for the poster. Your name is set as default, but you can choose any other person (e.g. Grandpa) as central person. Simply type in the first letters of the person’s name.

Then you have to choose between different tree views. Available are:

• (Partial)Family treeApplies to all persons that are visible in the person’s tree view.
• PedigreeApplies to all direct descendants of the selected person.
• Genealogical tableApplies to all ancestors of the selected person.
• “Hourglass”Combination of genealogical table and pedigree, from the selected person’s point of view.