You could see it in the new events section on your family site: today, the United States of America celebrates its 233rd birthday. It is a time when Americans remember the founding of the country and celebrate with family, friends, and fireworks. You might be surprised to find out that there's a good chance there's someone in your family who fought in the Revolutionary War. Let MyHeritage help you discover how your ancestors helped begin the great American experiment that is the United States.
The Sons and Daughters of the Revolution
Many families who have lived in the country for several generations can trace at least one branch of their family back to the Revolutionary War. Many of those Revolutionary ancestors helped the patriots in one way or another. Here are some of the ways your ancestors may have helped during the revolution:
- Serving in the Continental Army, Navy, or local militia, or French and Spanish veterans who fought with the Americans
- Serving in the Continental Congress, state government, or as a civil servant
- Signing of the Declaration of Independence
I thought it was about time I introduced myself. My name is Farhan Rehman, and I've joined the MyHeritage.com team, as the Community Manager for the UK. I'm really excited to be working with MyHeritage.com especially given that they're the leader in Social Networking Sites for the Family, and we all know how much attention sites like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Twitter are getting which are mainly social networking sites.
I started blogging in 2004, to stay in touch with my friends and family, whilst travelling, and the more time that passes, the more I see how challenging it can get staying in touch with each other, with sisters living in Dubai, and Canada, cousins in New York, and an extended family in India.
Born and raised in the UK, with a Pakistani Mother, and an Indian Father, I studied Computer Science at Durham University. After graduating I quickly learnt that I wasn't suited to jobs with all technology, and no people interaction. My passion always has been with helping people use technology, less in the building of it myself.
Since graduating, I've travelled and worked/volunteered in Switzerland, South Korea, San Francisco, and South Africa. Doing everything from working with large multi-nationals, volunteering with small non-profits, and even Teaching English.
If you've been on your family site today you may have noticed that the pages load faster - that is because we have greatly improved the performance of our site!
Some folks here at MyHeritage have been working day and night on the project, which started a few months ago when we switched to a new data center as well. The new data center has put the right hardware in place to be able to offer you a great quality of service.
Now we've also completed software upgrades to improve the performance of the site. This means the site is about twice as fast as of today!
Thanks go to our Sagi, Ran and others who've labored so much to get impress you with great speed!
Our work is never complete and we will continue to work hard to make the site even faster and better over the next few months but we think twice as fast is a great achievement already!
Genealogy is a world in itself. It's a unique one, with its rules, its secrets. You have to know how to read the signs of the past to trace what you are looking for: the roots of your family.
It takes time, perseverance and a great deal of curiosity. Passion, above all.
If this is how you feel about this noble activity, we have a challenge for you: we are looking for a Genealogy Advisor to help us strengthen our bonds with the genealogy community in the UK.
Since the tragic news of the death of Michael Jackson many people have taken an interest in his family. So too did we.
To give you a small overview of the King of Pop's family, many of whom are famous in their own right, all of which have different and varied histories, happy and sad, we've made a small tree of the family.
In the tree you can find the whole Jackson family- which consisted of ten children - and all the partners that Jacko had throughout his exciting life. The tree is a great illustration of how complicated families can get, when members have different spouses and children with different partners; Micheal Jackson had three different women in his life, among whom famous singer Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie Presley.
What many of you don't know is that we have a whole army of volunteers that help us translate our site into the 34 languages it is available in. Some of them work on the Family Tree Builder, some on translating the webpages and some on both.
Our family of helpers consists of over 80 volunteers who help with translations in 30 languages. Most of them have their own sites and know MyHeritage well. They really help us enormously so we think it is only fair to mention them briefly here to thank them!
Among this year's volunteers are (in no particular order):
Family Tree Magazine is America's #1 family history magazine. With stories on genealogy websites, ethnic heritage, family reunions, historical travel and family histories and memories it a great 'how to' publication with tips on discovering, preserving and celebrating family roots.
The magazine recently published the 10 websites that they deem best for " sharing and storing" and MyHeritage had a place in it!
This is what was said:
MyHeritage hosts more than 6.4 million family sites. Besides free sites, it offers Family Tree Builder software, a fun celebrity look-alike photo search, and a recently upgraded genealogy metasearch tool that looks for results in up to 1,350 sites and databases.
Since I was born in Russia, I did not celebrate fatherhood or father's day for many years until recently. There is no such a holiday in Russia, even though people celebrate the day of all men in February. But a couple of years ago after I moved to the States and became a mother I got a reason to learn more about this day as well as my husband. I was curious to find out more about the history of father's day and decided to share with you what I found out. I also found out some nice ways to surprise your dad through the MyHeritage site so find out more about that below.
The idea of a 'father's day' came about in Washington in 1909. It was Mrs Dodd who was seeking to honor her father, William Smart in a special way. William Smart, a Civil War veteran, was widowed when his wife
This user story reached us from Italy and it is a very touching one:
Miss Daniela Ciani and her husband, Mr. Alessandro Tessi, lost their daughter during the autumn of 2008. It has been a tough experience for them. While Daniela has always had a lot of relatives in her life, Alessandro has a small family, or at least he only knew a small part of his family.
As a consequence of their loss they both decided to start their own family tree, becoming MyHeritage users in November 2008. Soon after that, MyHeritage found smart matches between their tree and another Tessi's family tree in Australia. To his surprise Alessandro found a cousin of his in a photo, and immediately wrote to him. They had lost contact after the Second World War.
It was the beginning of the construction of a great family tree, which now has about 150 members from Australia, Hungary, Germany, Canada, and of course Italy.
Through MyHeritage Daniela and Alessandro also found out that
In the last post from our Discovering MyHeritage series we talked about how to create and set up Family Sites. And we told you that for every Family Site, you can create one or more Family Trees. This is what this post is about.
When you sign up for MyHeritage, you are given the possibility to create an online Family Tree right away. Alternatively you can start your Family Tree with a GEDCOM file, either directly at sign up or at any time afterwards. Alternatively, if you are using our Family Tree Builder software, you can publish the tree(s) you created there to the Family Site of your choice. Note that tree's that you publish from Family Tree Builder cannot be altered online, but all the changes you do in the software are by default updated on your Family Site as well.
And if want to create several online Family Trees within one of your Family Sites - for example if you want to work separately on different branches of your family - this is what you need to do:
To create a new tree you need to click on the 'Family Tree' tab on the MyHeritage main menu. You will see different options, go to "Manage Trees". There you have the option to create a new tree. Just follow the instructions and voila! You will have a new tree created on your Family Site.
The news about your activities related to this new tree will be posted on the home page of your Family Site, so everyone can follow your progress.
If you want to get to your tree, this is how to do it: go to the "Family Tree" tag and click the "Tree" option. On the right hand side of this page you will see a drop down menu that says "Family tree to display". There you can select the one you want to see and use.
A recent post by my friend Pat Richley (aka DearMyrtle) made me realize that I haven't posted anything about my last trip to the USA, where I gave a series of talks and met many interesting genealogy people.
It was a great opportunity to be able to be there and exchange experiences and knowledge, so I decided to share it with you.
In mid-March, I stopped in Salt Lake City, Utah on my way to nearby Provo, where I would give a few talks at the Computerized Family History and Genealogy Conference, held at Brigham Young University.
Even for an expert genealogist and considering all the information on the Internet today, visiting the LDS Family History Library - the largest genealogical library in the world - for the first time was quite impressive.
Nikos Pentheroudakis has used MyHeritage to build 3 family trees about his family and village in Crete. Join him as he discovers the origins of his family and tries to resolve a blood feud that has lasted 114 years!
Up until 1717, the surname Pentheroudakis didn't exist anywhere in the world, not even in Greece. The name first appeared in Crete, and all the people with that name and their families ultimately come from Crete. I set off to find all the Pentheroudakis' in the world, and my findings have been very remarkable!
Before 1717, my family ancestors had a different last name, as Crete was under Turkish occupation and Cretan names were not recognized by the government. Back then, the family name was either Sifis or Sifakas, which first appeared around 1460. These families came from the village Imbros, in a very hostile area of the province Sfakia. Around 1600, due to Turkish oppression, they moved their families about 10 miles east to Rodakino, a village in Rethymno province.
In 1717, Sifis, a boy from one of those families, changed his surname in order to avoid having a Turkish name. He chose Pentheroudakis, which comes from the Greek word "pentheros," which means "father-in-law."
Let's have a closer look at our new mobile upload via email: The idea is simple
Everybody in your family gets his own email address, and whatever photo, video or document they send there, will be published to your family site. The best thing about it: You can do that with any mobile device that is capable of emailing photos. So publishing your photos taken with any iPhone, blackberry or other email enabled phone is easier than ever before.
We made it safe for your family
To prevent strangers from publishing content to your website, you get an email address that consists of
Your whole family uploaded photos, tagged the people in them and created albums for the last family events? Now lean back and enjoy the beautifully animated presentations of your family photos on full screen!
Zoom in on the right face
You can now see a "slideshow" link in the sidebar of your family home page as well as the top navigation in the section "photos & videos". Once you clicked it you will be seeing the recent photos from your family site presented in our version of the "Ken Burns" effect. It is a presentation that pans over your still images and zooms into them while fading from one image to another, which gives you the impression of a movie. Don't know what that means? This presentation with photos of Barack Obama will make it more clear (pics from here).
You can see our Ken Burns presentation at its best, if you go to select album at the top and pick the photos of a person. Ken Burns will then only show photos of this person and always zoom in to where that person is on the photo. Just imagine all those yearbook photos and the like... now you will always be taken to who you are looking for.
Pick the album or person
In the select album window you will see
Last September MyHeritage revolutionized the way you organize your digital photos. Instead of manually adding names to all the people on all your photos, like on facebook, the MyHeritage photo tagging automates this process - making it much quicker and more fun. The now released new tagging feature still finds all the faces in your photos, groups those that are the same person and let's you quickly tag them with a name from your family tree or a new name. And after you identified all family members at least once you can turn on automatic tagging, so people in new photos will mostly be tagged automatically, at least if they are from your family.
Besides: You still get automatic albums for all people you have tagged, which only include photos with them. And there is still our beautiful "face cloud" that visually shows you who's most present in your family.
Tagging at the speed of light
First thing you'll notice is the complete redesign of the interface, even though some of the biggest changes happened behind the scenes, where we made your tagging go even faster. Now, the new tagging page is not only incredibly fast, but also very reliable and working quickly even with huge photo collections.
A new sidebar
Our new tagging interface got a nice facelift. One of the additions is
The Queen of England, Elizabeth II was born on born 21 April 1926, hence she celebrated her birthday on that day. Interestingly however, Australia and New Zealand celebrate her birthday on a completely different day, towards the beginning of June. This year, they are celebrating it today: on Monday, the 8th of June. As it is often a long weekend, it is an occasion that many Australians take to go see their family or to visit a sports match.
The Monarch's Birthday was first celebrated in Australia in 1788. In that year, King George III was the Monarch of the Commonwealth, which included Australia and New Zealand, and the first governor of New South Wales Arthur Phillip declared a holiday to mark his birthday. Originally, the Monarch's birthday was celebrated on the anniversary of the actual date of birth of the King or Queen. However, after the death of King George V in 1936, the date remained close to his birthday, which was June 3.
In fact we of MyHeritage have started an overview of the British Royal Family, including King Geoarg V, who's father was the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), the eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and going back to Queen Victoria, who was a niece of King George III's children, none if which lived to take over from him. She was the last monarch of the House of Hanover and the only legitimate child of the Duke of Kent.
The devil is in the detail and small changes can make a big difference, these are all things we believe in. That's why this week we have changed our header and footer: its a small change but you'll see it will make a big difference to your family site!
You may have noticed the change, but if not, it means you will have:
- A renewed nicer, cleaner look for the header and footer on your family pages
- Less text in both so more room for your family tree and the content on your family pages
- A site overview in your header enabling you to select where you want to go on your site in one glance. You can now choose from MyFamily, Celebrities& Fun, Community, Genealogy, Downloads and Gifts - A new language selection option at the right hand side of your footer with a pop-up to select the language of you site
Enjoy the changes, they are made to make your experience on the site more enjoyable!
You could see it in the new events section on your family site: today, the United States of America celebrates its 233rd birthday. It is a time when Americans remember the founding of the country and celebrate with family, friends, and fireworks. You might be surprised to find out that there's a good chance there's someone in your family who fought in the Revolutionary War. Let MyHeritage help you discover how your ancestors helped begin the great American experiment that is the United States.
I thought it was about time I introduced myself. My name is Farhan Rehman, and I've joined the MyHeritage.com team, as the Community Manager for the UK. I'm really excited to be working with MyHeritage.com especially given that they're the leader in Social Networking Sites for the Family, and we all know how much attention sites like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Twitter are getting which are mainly social networking sites.
Some folks here at MyHeritage have been working day and night on the project, which started a few months ago when we switched to a 
Genealogy is a world in itself. It's a unique one, with its rules, its secrets. You have to know how to read the signs of the past to trace what you are looking for: the roots of your family. 
To give you a small overview of the King of Pop's family, many of whom are famous in their own right, all of which have different and varied histories, happy and sad, we've made 
What many of you don't know is that we have a whole army of volunteers that help us translate our site into the 
Family Tree Magazine is America's #1 family history magazine. With stories on genealogy websites, ethnic heritage, family reunions, historical travel and family histories and memories it a great 'how to' publication with tips on discovering, preserving and celebrating family roots. 
Since I was born in Russia, I did not celebrate fatherhood or father's day for many years until recently. There is no such a holiday in Russia, even though people celebrate the day of all men in February. But a couple of years ago after I moved to the States and became a mother I got a reason to learn more about this day as well as my husband. I was curious to find out more about the history of father's day and decided to share with you what I found out. I also found out some nice ways to surprise your dad through the MyHeritage site so find out more about that below. 
As a consequence of their loss they both decided to start their own family tree, becoming MyHeritage users in November 2008. Soon after that, MyHeritage found smart matches between their tree and another Tessi's family tree in Australia. To his surprise Alessandro found a cousin of his in a photo, and immediately wrote to him. They had lost contact after the Second World War.
If you want to get to your tree, this is how to do it: go to the "Family Tree" tag and click the "Tree" option. On the right hand side of this page you will see a drop down menu that says "Family tree to display". There you can select the one you want to see and use.
A recent post by my friend Pat Richley (aka 
Today we launch our new photo features. This means 
The Queen of England, Elizabeth II was born on born 21 April 1926, hence she celebrated her birthday on that day. Interestingly however, Australia and New Zealand celebrate her birthday on a completely different day, towards the beginning of June. This year, they are celebrating it today: on Monday, the 8th of June. As it is often a long weekend, it is an occasion that many Australians take to go see their family or to visit a sports match.
You may have noticed the change, but if not, it means you will have:
- A new language selection option at the right hand side of your footer with a pop-up to select the language of you site
Mario on Photo tagging got faster, easier to use and a pleasure to look at: Hi Kari, T
Fernande Parent on Photo tagging got faster, easier to use and a pleasure to look at: F�licitati
Gilberto Koo on Thanks! Gracias! Merci! Faleminderit! Gracies! Kiitos! Dankjewel! Multumesc!: Thanks! H