MyHeritage

[2][3][4] Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 19.9 billion historical records, among other features.

The company also began offering a new web-based feature that allowed users to upload genealogical information directly to the MyHeritage site.

[7] In 2010, the company acquired Germany-based OSN Group, a family tree website network with seven genealogy sites under its name.

[34] In addition to the acquisition of Geni, MyHeritage also raised US$25 million in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

[35] In April 2013, MyHeritage released Family Tree Builder 7.0, which included new features like sync, Unicode, and record matches.

[38] In October 2014, the company partnered with EBSCO Information Services to provide educational institutions (libraries, universities, etc.)

[40] The company also surpassed 5 billion historical records in their database in 2014[14] and launched the Instant Discoveries feature, which enables users to add whole branches of relatives to their family tree at once.

[15] In March 2016, employees of MyHeritage recorded and preserved the family history of remote peoples in the Highlands Region of Papua New Guinea.

[8] Also in 2018, chief science officer Yaniv Erlich received media attention for creating a family tree of 13 million people using data from Geni.com.

[50] In August that year, MyHeritage announced the acquisition of the French-based genealogy platform Filae, in a deal valued at €31.1 million.

[51] In March 2024, MyHeritage launched a subscription-based newspaper archive website similar to other sites like Newspapers.com, and NewspaperArchive named OldNews.

Once a lab extracts a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) profile from an unknown suspect's DNA, the data file is then uploaded to a public genetic genealogy database.

[67] But the chief executive of FamilyTreeDNA later told the Wall Street Journal that he gave law enforcement permission to use the database without knowing the case under investigation.

[68] The Los Angeles Times reported that when investigators were unsatisfied with the leads generated by both GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, they utilized the MyHeritage database.

[61][65] In an interview with the East Bay Times, civilian geneticist Barbara Rae-Venter came forward as the person who identified DeAngelo as a suspect.

[69] She reportedly uploaded the suspect's DNA data file on her personal MyHeritage account without notifying the company, a decision that was approved by an attorney with the FBI Division Counsel.

[61] Following the use of the database in the DeAngelo case, MyHeritage revised its privacy policy to explicitly prohibit use by law enforcement.

[71] According to civilian geneticist Leah Larkin, investigators in Riverside County, California, used the MyHeritage database to identify the remains of a woman whose body was discovered along the 60 Freeway in 1996.

The website will provide excerpts from historical records and newspapers, or from other family trees, but in order to read full versions of those documents, or confirm relationships, the user will have to have a paid subscription.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are eligible for free accounts due to the aforementioned partnership between MyHeritage and FamilySearch.

[81] The SuperSearch feature allows users to search through the site's entire catalog of historical records to find information about potential family members.

[35] MyHeritage's mobile app is available for iOS and Android devices and offers a range of similar features including the ability to view and edit family trees, research historical databases, and capture and share photos.

[85] DNA results are obtained from home test kits, allowing users to use cheek swabs to collect samples.

[85] In 2018, the company offered 5,000 of these kits as part of an initiative to reunite migrant families separated at the United States-Mexico border.

In January 2018, MyHeritage launched the Chromosome Browser, a tool that provides a visual representation of the 22 autosomal chromosome pairs, and which was improved in March of the same year with an option to compare up to 7 autosomal DNA matches at the same time in order to find shared common segments that can be used to indicate a common ancestor by triangulation.

[89][90][91] In February 2019, MyHeritage launched the Theory of Family Relativity, a tool that works by incorporating the genealogical information contained in family trees with the company's collection of historical records and the shared DNA segments of users in order to predict different ways how two people that share DNA are related.

[97][98] In December 2020, MyHeritage launched a feature called "Genetic Groups", which pinpoints precise ancestor locations to 2,114 geographic regions based on ancestral events and complements the Ethnicity Estimate.

[102] Deep Nostalgia is an AI-powered service that allows users to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos.

[107] This tool uses technology licensed from Astria, an Israeli start-up focused on customized AI image generation.

Original MyHeritage office in the village of Bnei Atarot, Israel
MyHeritage headquarters in Or Yehuda, Israel
A Deep Nostalgia video clip derived from a single photo taken in 1930