It was great to hear that MyHeritage was nominated for the Open Web Awards in the "Mainstream Social Network" category. Next to the likes of facebook, MySpace and Twitter we are in good company ;-)
Mashable is one of the most popular blogs about social media and they will give away this award for the second time.

Out of 43 000 nominations we made it into the round of the last 14 Social networks. Not too bad.

Now we just need enough votes to win the competition, and that's where all of you guys come into play:

Vote for us by entering you email address on the right.
They will then send you an email and if you confirm by clicking on the link they send, your vote will be counted.

Let's climb the top of social networking heaven together...

The genealogists among you have probably heard about DNA research. Genetics is a fascinating field of biology and its technical advances can help you to find out more about your family history.

Therefore we have now teamed up with FamilyTreeDNA, the company that has pioneered DNA-based family research almost a decade ago. By now they are the most popular DNA testing service and as a MyHeritage user you'll get an amazing deal on some of their products.

Through MyHeritage you will save $60 on the mtDNAplus package. We offer you three of their products, all with a nice discount and starting from as little as $129, including the testing kit that you will receive ahead and the results and certificate after the analysis.

Some of the tests will give you details about your ethnic and geographic origin. Or they can help you to find out if you are really related to someone of the same name from another country. Especially if there are no written records. So it's the perfect supplement for your family tree on MyHeritage.

A DNA test can help you to recreate missing family links. And by the way:

Continue reading "Try our family offer to trace your ancestors using genetics and FamilyTreeDNA" »

Do I love my family more than anything else in the world because I am French? Because I am Algerian? ... Or because I am a human being? Having a double nationality, French-Algerian, but being the country manager of MyHeritage for France, these are some questions that I have been thinking about. I will attempt to answer them below, as I am sure there are some of you who occasionally ask yourselves similar questions.

Why do my two brothers and I call my mother once a day at noon? Why do I believe that the family is the most important unit ever? Is it because I am French or because I am Algerian? Is it reasonable to think that there is no link between people's love for their family and their origins?

On the one hand it looks easy to say that everybody loves their family and that this is the same in all cultures. On the other hand,...

Continue reading "Why is my family so important for me? " »

Petrus, one of our users from Romania has sent us those insights about his interesting country, for which we have just added a new language version of MyHeritage. Petrus also wrote about us on his blog.

A few days ago, a Scotsman left me a message in my Youtube Inbox, telling me how much he loves Romania, Brasov especially.

How can you not love this country once you've eaten traditional dishes and drunk the plum brandy?
Believe it or not, Romania is the continental champion when it comes to plum production.

Maybe beer is the most consumed drink here in Romania, but nothing compares to that alcoholic beverage traditionally called tsuika and the wines from the vineyards in the south of the country.

Of course, the Romanian people are behind all of these. Most of the Romanians

Continue reading "How to be a Romanian" »

This story was sent to us by Liora Cohen. Helping families like Liora's stay in touch is what keeps us all going at MyHeritage. But read for yourself:

We finally had our family meeting! It was a direct result of having a family site at MyHeritage. The idea of a meeting came after we started our site and saw that the family, however distantly related, is showing interest. We currently have 132 members on our family site at MyHeritage.com of whom about 100 have visited the site. We have 698 names on the tree, about 220 of them are alive.

This is the first time we've held such a reunion. The reunion was held in the Blue-Bay Hotel in Netanya, Israel Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2008. There were 65 participants - 44 Israelis and 21 from Australia, US, Austria and Hungary. Between themselves people spoke English, Hebrew, Hungarian, German and some Slovak. One person flew in from Ohio just to be there for one day!

Our family name is Frankl. Originating, (or as far back as we could find) from a little place called Mliecno, today a part of Samorin in Slovakia - Austrohungary by then. We called the reunion Frankl 28 due to the fact that my Great-Grandmother was one of 28 siblings (one mother, one father, no twins). Our tree is very well documented thanks to my parents who updated it for the past 30 years as well as other relatives before that.

There are not enough words to describe...

Continue reading "User story: The Frankl family gets reunited through MyHeritage!" »

You might have seen our lovely family tree of business cards at the Future Of Web Apps, a conference in London also called "FOWA". Now finally we have drawn the winner out of the 75 people, who put up their card on our tree during the event on Friday.

What we had put up for grabs? Free advertising on myheritage.com.
By now there are almost 27 million of you guys using the site, so that's quite a big audience for a free ad ;-)

So let us respectfully proceed to the announcement of the lucky one:

And the winner is...

Continue reading "And the winner is... Our advertising raffle at FOWA" »

As we recently launched our site in Lithuanian, we wanted to introduce you to the country of Lithuania as part of our country series. I visited Lithuania's capital Vilnius recently so I wanted to share with you some traditions I found out about there.

Lithuania is the most southern of the three Baltic states (the other two being Estonia and Latvia) and the largest and most populous of them. 84% of the population are ethnic Lithuanians with the two largest minorities being Poles and Russians. The Lithuanian language is part of the Baltic languages, which in turn are part of the Indo-European languages, a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most of the major languages of Europe.

In 2009, Lithuania will celebrate its millennium. The name Lithuania was mentioned for the first time in 1009 in the Annales Quedlinburgenses, a book dedicated to the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

So how does one go about being a Lithuanian? Here are a few of my tips. Of course there is much more to this beautiful country, but this is a start:

Continue reading "How to be a Lithuanian" »

Czech beer, football players, Prague, Skoda cars - that's what most people think of when they hear about the Czech Republic or Slovakia. As country manager for these two countries and since this is my first post on the MyHeritage blog, I would just like to say hello and briefly introduce these two nations.

When people ask me where I come from and I reply "from the Czech Republic", it's always amusing to see how confused they are. Often they just reply "ah, Czechoslovakia." It has been 15 years since Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into two countries, but obviously there are still a lot of people who do not know about it.

Continue reading "What is Czechoslovakia?!" »

Some of you have gotten very creative with our celebrity face recognition. To give everybody else a taste of their creations, we have gathered some of the funniest ones below. There is a lot more on YouTube, if you are interested.

A big thank you to everybody who made one of those videos!

This one is by David Casserly, an Anna Paquin look-alike ;-) See the video to find out who else he looks like though.
Warning: the video is absolutely hilarious!

And here are more of our favorites:

Continue reading "Who do they look like?" »

We have launched in nine additional languages!

Good news for all Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Danish, Lithuanian, Malay, Farsi, Romanian and Serbian speakers, you can now start building your family site in your own language and ask your family from around to world to join you.

The additional languages also make our new photo tagging available to more of you. If you haven't tried our new way of sharing and tagging people in photos already, have a look HERE.

Adding these languages brings the total of languages available on our site to 34 and this means we now cover more than 85% of the languages spoken on the web!

To celebrate our getting more and more international, we will feature each of the countries where these languages are spoken on our blog in the coming weeks. The series will kick off next week with our feature: "How to be a Lithuanian".
Insight tips guaranteed, so be sure to keep an eye on our blog!