4. Remember how you wrote letters before
the Internet? Of course you had to wait
for answers, but that was also part of
the allure and fun of research.
24. Smart Matches™
• Tree to Tree matches
• A match means a person in another tree was found,
thought to be the same person in your tree
• Matches are based on names, dates, places, facts and
relationships
• Benefit:
• Contact other relatives you didn’t know existed
• Learn what other tree owners know
• They may have rare photos of your ancestors
• Extract information directly to your tree
• A single Smart Match™ can change a person’s life
or the life of an entire family
• Use caution: family trees contain errors
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Automation
• Automation is key to power
technologies for matching.
• Critical to save time: users cannot
possibly research every name on every
data source in every spelling variation.
• Automation does it for you. On
MyHeritage this is done on our huge
server farm.
28. Gray Area for full image
Found in our library of +9 billion+9 billion global records: BMD,
census, immigration, historical newspapers, military
and more.
Run automatically to help you discover your family
history.
The more people you have, better chances to get
Record Matches.
Record Matches
29. • Should we be looking at more than just
vital records?
• Shouldn’t we be studying our
ancestors lives?
31. • Find maps showing the locations of
your ancestors’ houses, even though
the streets have since disappeared!
32. • Many lanes and roads have been
extinguished to build estates and office
blocks. Streets may have been
renumbered, redirected, while others
have been shortened with part of the
road having being built over.
33. • All this means that searching for where
an ancestor lived by using modern
maps can be frustrating when they fail
to pinpoint where the old properties
had once been.
• However, TheGenealogist’s technolgy
will perform the work for you!
34.
35.
36.
37. You can even find a record in the census
and jump directly to a map of your
ancestor’s residence!
38.
39.
40. Today, More
Interest in
Genealogy than
Ever Before
• Television programmes
• Online web sites
(TheGenealogist.co.uk, Findmypast,
MyHeritage, FamilySearch,
Ancestry.com and many others)
41. The Digital World Makes Comparing and
Sharing of Online Data and Online
Trees Easier than Ever Before
42. In the future, it might not be possible to
visit an archive in person anymore.
The originals are stored in a central
repository; separate archives have
been eliminated to save costs. If you
want to consult records that are not
available online, they will be digitized
for free. That is cheaper than operating
dozens of reading rooms.
45. • DNA could potentially be used to
recreate portions of the genome of the
individual that they are all related to.
This recreated genome will provide
other information about the DNA-only
ancestor, such as predicted eye color,
hair color, medical conditions, and
traits. It could also be used to find
other relatives.
46. • All we need is enough DNA samples
from enough descendants to re-create
a person’s DNA.
47. • Hans Jonathan was an escaped slave
who settled in Iceland, married a local
woman, and raised a family before
dying in 1827.
• There are no pictures of Hans
Jonathan.
• Yet his DNA has been reconstructed!
49. Your ancestor’s DNA may be
reconstructed but we may not have a
name!
Would you be willing to refer to an
ancestor in Boston as
“Boston-GCUGCCGCAGCG”?
50. • Reconstructed DNA will help you and
your family detect inherited medical
conditions long before the appearance
of symptoms!
51. • Prediction #1
• Putting your genealogy research
results on the Internet will continue to
become simpler and easier.
52. • Prediction #2
• Finding both original records and the
results of others' research on the
Internet will continue to become
simpler and easier.
53. • Prediction #3
• The accuracy of the information
published on the Internet will continue
to be variable but Internet genealogists
will recognize and deal effectively with
accuracy issues, then will collaborate
to groom the data already published.
54. • Prediction #4
• More collaborative efforts will emerge
as a result of Internet-connected
genealogists sharing their work
towards common goals.
56. • Prediction #6
• Interest in genealogy will continue to
increase for many more years as
information becomes easier and easier
to obtain.
57. • Will all this be perfect?
• Absolutely not. Rough edges will
always appear and research errors will
continue to plague us, only in smaller
and smaller amounts every year.
There is very deep technology behind Smart Matches and many years of engineering. But it’s also based on building extensive dictionaries,
that MyHeritage has been doing in the last 5 years. We improve them using feedback that we get from users: users confirm and reject matches on MyHeritage.This helps us know how accurate our technology is, and we constantly learn from the rejections and improve the technology to make it better.As an example, our first name dictionaries are the best in the industry, they are hand-curated by us and contain more than a million first names, in many languages, so MyHeritage can match a tree of a Russian user in Cyrillic letters to a tree of an American user in English, as well as handle languages such as Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, and others. So in these examples we start off we a simple example, of variations of the name Abraham…and proceed to a more advanced example of the name Alexander. Did you know that the nickname forAlexander is Sasha in Russian?MyHeritage knows that and uses that for matching. MyHeritage has the most advanced name matching in the world of genealogy thanks to this workand the powerful decision making algorithms that make up the technology.
Covers variations automatically that no person has time to do on their own, then uses technologies to find matches, rank them and score them
Compares more than a billion family tree individuals to more than 4 billion records: this is “big data”
