The dedicated team here at MyHeritage has decided to get a head start on spring cleaning this year. We have put our heads together to spruce up your family pages with new additions that make your family site easier to organize.

What you'll notice first is that your Site Members page has a new, sleek, blue and white look. The new page gives you a more clear overview of your family site members, along with several new and improved features. You can view:

1. Your members list, your site managers, and who has requested membership
2. Your relationship to each of your site members
3. Everyone's country and address
4. Who has visited, and who has never visited (but I'm sure they have a good excuse!)
5. Additional actions, like viewing member profiles

And this is what you can do:
6. Link a new member to your family tree - it's very useful
7. Send emails to all your family members at once
8. Invite more members to your family site

With the new relationship column (2) you can keep track of the whole family and, maybe most important, you can see which site members are not identified in your family tree and directly link them with their profile in the family tree. Site members might not be linked, if for example you published your tree through Family Tree Builder and we couldnt identify them automatically.
Just type their name in the relationship column, if you see a "find in family" box there and hit apply.

Why you might want to do this?

Today is another big day in the life of MyHeritage. Today the 30 millionth user joined our family network!

We want to thank Alan from the UK for signing up to the site! But also congratulations to those of you who, just like Alan, love their families, stay in a touch with them and share photos and videos, plan events or research their family history on our site.

30 million is really something. Imagine the number of inhabitants of both Australia and Austria and we are still talking about less people than the number of our users. And our 30 million users, collectively, have built family trees with 320 million profiles!

However, we are not interested in collecting users, but rather

This year London saw the "Who do you think you are?" LIVE Exhibition taking place from February 27 to March 1. The show takes its name from the popular UK BBC series by the same name, a documentary that shows famous TV stars' journey into their pasts.

Being a national history show about all things genealogy in the UK, for advanced researchers to absolute beginners, the London team of MyHeritage were convinced they couldn't give this show a miss.

So Family Tree Builder CD's in hand we set out to meet some of you guys offline.

Today is international women's day, a day that honours the economic, political and social achievements of women, and a day that is also, and this is less well known, the counterpart of the global men's day on the 18th of November.

Although the day was initially one of political significance, highlighting women's struggles worldwide in a hopeful way, the holiday has blended in the culture of many countries. In countries such as Algeria, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Italy, Israel, Laos or Mongolia, it is even an official day off. There, the day is observed by men giving the women in their lives - mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, colleagues, flowers and small gifts. In some countries, such as Romania or Russia, it is also observed as an equivalent of Mother's Day, where children also give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

We are happy to introduce our new "Find your family" feature.

It makes finding and adding people to your Family Site easier, by letting you check for family members in pretty much any email address book that you're using on the Web.

The site understands and shows you who from your email address books is already a MyHeritage member or even in your Family Tree, and then allows you to send invitations to these people.

In case you are wondering, we won't store your password or login information for any webmail you are using. So the service is very safe.

Just go to the "Find your family" option in your Family Site home page. There you can

When you think of St. Patrick's Day, you think of Ireland, green, three leaf clovers, and leprechauns. But St. Patrick's Day was not always that way. Here is a compilation of little-known facts about St. Patty's Day, how it is celebrated in different cities across America, and how you can use MyHeritage to find your Irish roots.

St. Patty's Day Blue?

While we all associate St. Patrick's Day with green, the original color of the day was blue because statues and paintings of St. Patrick always depicted him wearing blue. This tradition ended 139 years after the first St. Patrick's Day celebration. While nobody knows for sure why green became the color of the day, it might have been due to the phrase, "wearing of the green," which referred to wearing a green shamrock as a symbol of Irish pride.

Politicians, stay-at-home dads, academics or businesswomen...they all know the value of family and the joys of staying in touch with them. But what is on their family photo's? How often do they call their mother and what celebrity do they secretly admire? Get ready to find out through the MyHeritage interview series!

Laura Pergola lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina where she has set up the Multifamilias foundation. The foundation brings families with twins, triplets or multiples together. Its mission is to offer advice and help on health in multiple pregnancies and to improve the quality of life of the children born at the same birth. This time Laura answers MyHeritage's questions.

When was Multifamilia set up and why?

The idea to set up Multifamilias started in 2000, when I tried to find information about the risks of a multiple pregnancy and the issues regarding the raising of multiple children but could not find it. Today we have a database of 7000 families. we offer them advice from a team of professionals from different fields. And we edit the only magazine about this topic in the Spanish language.

What is on your favourite family photo?

This story was sent to us by Terry Dean Oscar Romstad, a keen genealogist and convert to MyHeritage's SmartMatching. His matches have allowed him to find and get in touch with relatives all over the world in places ranging from the Channel Islands to Norway. He's even placed some of his father and mother's ancestors together in 15th century France. He writes:

It all started in 1976 when my father Oscar retired and needed something to occupy his time. I gave him a Commodore 64 and a Roots program; he went on from there entering data and information from local family relatives and more generally learning about the world of genealogy. Once a year I returned home from my military service to help him by solving computer issues but also getting a list of people I could visit in my travels to help him with his research. By 1999, my father's vision was failing and I took over the controls from him. We made email and chat connections over the Internet which thrilled him to no end. Imagine what MyHeritage would have meant to him had he not passed away at age 94 in 2004.

When my father had to stop his research because of ill health he had 1,800 people in his files.

MyHeritage members and fans can now take advantage of our RSS and Twitter feeds. For those of you who are technologically-challenged, this guide will walk you through how to start using these time-saving, new features.

The MyHeritage RSS Feed

RSS feeds are subscriptions to your favorite blogs and websites. Think about receiving the daily newspaper: it's delivered to your door every time the publisher has new stories, which is everyday. You don't have to call the publisher's office to ask them if they have new stories. But that is what you have to do on the Internet: visit every website just to see if there is new content. If there is new content, that's great, but if not, you can waste big chunks of time by checking lots of websites that haven't been updated at all. However, by subscribing to an RSS feed, you can have the new content delivered directly to your email - just like the newspaper delivered right to your door. No more time wasted checking websites that haven't been updated!

Whether you are Irish, have Irish ancestry, need an excuse to drink Guinness, or paint your river green, MyHeritage wishes you a happy Paddy's day!

We wrote previously about the little known facts about this day.

It turns out there are some more... We found out for example that, while it is customary to wear green on St. Patrick's Day in the United States, the color green is actually considered unlucky in Ireland. The story goes that green is the color of faeries, which are believed to steal children who wear too much green.

Other random things to know are that there are nine places named after Dublin, the capital of Ireland, of which eight are in the US, and one in the UK; that the shamrock is not only supposed to bring

Family Day is the modern version of Mother's Day in several countries across the world like Canada, South Africa and Israel. Here, children are asked to bring drawings and pictures of their family to school; Noa had asked us to bring baby photos of ourselves. We made it into a "Guess who's this" competition in the weeks running up to Family Day and you can see all of them below.

By the way: It was Ayelet who won, with an impressive 17 correct guesses out of 21. You can find her as a kid on the far left, in the red jumper and with the bread (and face) full of chocolate spread.

So this is the Israel-based part of the MyHeritage team, when we were kids. You can find some of us in our "about" section with other vintage photos.

In Israel, Family Day is generally celebrated on the 30th day of

MyHeritage wishes all Irish and English moms a beautiful mother's day.

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter Sunday. It is believed to fall on this day because in the 16th century there was a Christian practice of visiting one's mother's church annually, which meant that most mothers would be reunited with their children on this day. Historians believe that young apprentices and young women in servitude were released by their masters that weekend in order to visit their families.

Whereas for many people the religious significance may have been lost by now, the appreciation of one's mother has not faded. One would only have had to be around London this weekend where many Londoners were on their way with flowers in hand to visit their mother, to see that the tradition is alive and well!

We hope you will have a chance to be with your mother this Sunday, whether that is online or offline.

And for moms in other countries...see you in May!

This Story was sent to us by Hasan Altaf Saleem, who has managed to get 221 relatives as members on his family site. Next are plans for a family reunion. Read his story here:

A couple of years ago I was away from home, thinking about where my family came from and who actually constitutes the "whole" family. I made a basic immediate-family website but was not satisfied with it. With renewed resolve I started out making a little overview using charting software (omnigraffle and visio) and soon, I had my immediate family all mapped out and wanted to grow it. In order to keep it organized and readily accessible, I went online for some genealogy services. That is when I came across MyHeritage.

My immediate family has been living in Pakistan since before India's partition. My earlier ancestors, however, moved from India to what is now Pakistan. They moved to, and set up industry in a city called Chinyot. I was born in Multan, and brought up in Faisalabad not very far from Chinyot (though, I have never been to Chinyot). In 1992 my family moved from Faisalabad to Lahore where we have lived ever since.

Purim is a Jewish holiday that has its roots in the biblical Book of Esther. It is supposed to be celebrated with feasting, maybe that's why it is so popular among Jews around the world. The most obvious way of celebrating it nowadays is that people are dressing up: kids at school, youngsters at parties and grown-ups at company events.

For the MyHeritage Purim party 2009 everyone dressed up as well and our theme was "superheroes". So we dressed up as fantasy heroes from the likes of Batman, Roman gods, Zarra (the female Zorro), Kermit & Miss Piggy, to super cache, super chicken and a super family tree. The costume competition went into a tie break between the super photo page (see picture) and the ToDos slayer together with the invisible power translator. The latter ones were victorious.

Besides the food and feasting, there was also some...