NSBJD – Genealogy information

By: Tom Hartley
My Heritage provides, for free, all the tools and a versatile website for a do-it-yourself online family tree. You can publish your family’s biographical details, stories, scanned documents and photos, and even videos. Your legacy will be safe and secure for generations, available to everyone or only to those you invite to be members. Your free account allows for 250 people on your tree and 250 MB of memory, enough for plenty of photos, especially if you compress them.

Popular features on the site are charts and reports, and especially the sophisticated photo handling and face recognition software. You can even share recipes and hold opinion polls about any topic. Soon there will be applications for blogging and the secure sharing of family medical history.

If social networking is your pleasure, then My Heritage has everything you need to connect with family: email boxes and directories, private message boards, event calendars, birthday notices, newsletters and more. The family tree helpfully organizes everything using names, dates and faces.

If you are primarily interested in family history research, My Heritage automatically links your records to all the major genealogical sites, since others might have already done the research for you. The software helps you make the comparisons and additions that help grow your tree. All the changes to your tree can be easily cited with reference notes because you might want to go back to a source to research other family members, to double check an exact location, date or the spelling of a name, or because a previous researcher might have missed something.

Gathering everything you know about your past can be a challenge, but the master tree building program has a no-nonsense and intuitive format that makes it easy. There are also forums, communities, help features and online support for users.

You will be certain to meet people, maybe even long-lost relatives, when you grow your own free family tree on My Heritage.

For more information on online genealogy check out the Facebook group Family History Using Computers