My personal in-depth exploration into the MyHeritage.com site has taken a new twist. With Legacy 9's new Legacy Hints, I can now receive Smart Matches to other MyHeritage trees right from within Legacy. If you've missed the previous posts, here they are:
The more I learn about the technology behind MyHeritage, the more enthusiastic I have become about trying it out. Most recently, I have been checking out the hints in the new Legacy 9. Notice below, Joshua Brown's new Hint icon shows the number 9+ indicating that there are at least ten newly-found hints waiting for me to check.
Clicking on the icon brings up the Hint Results screen, which in this case, shows that of the four major sites (MyHeritage, FamilySearch, FindMyPast, and GenealogyBank) only MyHeritage found something. Not only did it find something, it found 29 somethings!
Clicking on it opened the Matches screen at MyHeritage. While I'm curious to see what others have published about my Joshua Brown, I was surprised to see that the first Smart Match came from the Rasmussen Web Site – that's MY tree!
In my first post I showed how I uploaded the tree from my Legacy software to MyHeritage. I guess it makes perfect sense that Legacy would find my tree and thus provide me with a Smart Match in Legacy Hints. But…I probably don't really need that clue, do I?
So…knowing how responsive MyHeritage has been with my past emails to them, I thought I would send in a suggestion. Thinking there was no way to turn off smart matching to my own tree, I recommended that they consider an option to prevent this from happening. Less than three hours later I received a response telling me this could already be done. I'm liking them more and more….
If you have your tree at MyHeritage too, and want to avoid Smart Matches to your own tree from within Legacy, follow these steps:
- Login to your account at MyHeritage.com and navigate to My Privacy in the pull-down menu of your account that appears in the top right corner of any page.
- Your family sites will be listed on the left. Click Content below the relevant site.
- Turn off the checkbox labeled Enable Smart Matching with other MyHeritage websites and partners and click Save at the bottom of the page.
Then I went back to Legacy, and clicked on the Refresh icon on Joshua's Hint Results screen and waited about a minute.
After closing the screen and reopening, it now showed just 28 possible matches! My site was now removed from the results. Well done MyHeritage!
Now I'm looking forward to reviewing the remaining 28 Smart Matches.
New Webinar
I'm also looking forward to seeing if there's even more that I might be overlooking. I've invited MyHeritage to join me for a live webinar next Thursday, May 18 to explain the behind-the-scenes of their technology and how it interacts with Legacy. Here's its description:
Legacy Family Tree 9 sifts through billions of records from the key websites to bring you relevant and promising matches for your ancestors. In this webinar, Legacy’s Geoff Rasmussen will review – LIVE! – some of the Legacy Hints that are waiting for him in his personal family file. This time, he will explore possible Record Matches and Smart Matches that MyHeritage.com has discovered for him.
On hand to walk Geoff through his results will be MyHeritage’s Director of Content Operations, Mike Mansfield. He will also give an insider’s perspective into the technology that makes MyHeritage’s Smart Matching and Record Matching so effective.
Rick – Legacy 9 does not publish anything to MyHeritage, ever. MyHeritage does not extract data from Legacy 9 and publish it to a tree on MyHeritage, ever. It is common for people to sign up for a MyHeritage account, and then forget about their account years later. Also, signing up on MyHeritage does create a tree of 1 person – you – as a side-effect of signing up. Perhaps that is why you have a one-person tree there.