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 find 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.

If you are up for it, have a look at the job specifications.

It's a family here, join us!

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 Sagi, Ran and others who've labored so much to 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.

I thought it was about time I introduced myself. My name is Farhan Rehman, and I've recently joined the MyHeritage.com team, as the Community Manager for the UK. I'm really excited to be working with MyHeritage especially given that we're the leader in social networking 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 for friends.

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.

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

Some believe solidarity among older and younger generations within families is disappearing. We've never really believed that pessimistic view, and the 32 million members of MyHeritage indicate generation solidarity as well. Now the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) reports family solidarity is alive and well.

Findings by the institute, based on a European wide survey if 19,000 elderly people, suggests there still is a strong bond between family members. They reported European older adults feel a strong sense of duty when it comes to

This summer we're making changes in our Basic plan, and at the same time we're offering an amazing 35% off the Premium plan until the end of July 2009. So you can go to your family site now and grab an extra year for cheap before the discount runs out.

Recently, we've seen the cost of storage dropping, while maintaining large trees became much more resource intensive. Hence we decided to decrease the maximum number of people in a tree on a Basic site and balance that with more than twice the storage for photos, videos and documents.
If you have a Basic site that was created before April 2009, these changes will apply to your site as of August 1st. Sites created after April already have the new capacities from the beginning, so no changes there, except that if you own such a site, you too can benefit from this discount on an upgrade to Premium.

So, if you've been using your site to share photos, videos and documents with your family, this is good news for you because you'll now get more than double the storage for free, 250 MB instead of the 100 MB you had previously.
However, if the size of your tree is above 250 people, you will now need to switch to a Premium subscription to get that capacity. To make the step to Premium easier for you, we started this summer special.
For $4 a month you can boost your family site on MyHeritage and also gain access to all Premium features of our Family Tree Builder software.

Nobody is forced to upgrade: even folks who will need an upgrade can keep their current tree as is without anything being deleted and without losing access, without upgrading.

So don't miss out on this 35% discount and upgrade your site before August 1st. Getting your family closer together is surely worth $4 a month.

And a Premium subscription gives you a whole range of benefits. Your

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 photos? How often do they call their mother and what celebrity do they secretly admire? Get ready to find out through the MyHeritage interview series!

It only takes a photo, a conversation, a story, to awaken the genealogy investigator in us. Pablo Briand knows this from his own experience. He set off to inquire about his own roots with the help of technology and Internet tools, without which he may not have become the genealogist he has been for almost 20 years.

Combining his interest in technology and genealogy, Pablo hosts his project on a blog called "Gen Briand", where he writes and sheds light on genealogy related topics, rather than just providing historical data. He wants to help fellow genealogists bring their records alive and provide information that can let them draw the living context of their ancestors.

He also keeps a website depicting the origins and story of his family, which goes back 500 years.

Pablo is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, but he has lived in Miami, USA, for the past eight years. He has French roots, which is why his family website is in French, as well as Spanish and English. There's no doubt he's a man with a passion for genealogy. This is what he told us:

At MyHeritage we believe in the power of technology to bring people and families together. We're sure our service can deliver happiness to our users and that is why we reach out to people using every form of communication available. But that's old news.

What's new is that we are using Twitter; well we have been using it for some time! But now that Twitter has become popular, and we're finding it so useful and helpful it made sense to us to invite you to join Twitter, and follow us too.

Twitter is a free online communication tool, the most innovative and the one with the highest rate of growth in comparison to other social media platforms.

You may have heard that Obama (@barackobama) used Twitter in his presidential campaign or that actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) wanted to prove that he could get 1 million followers before CNN (@cnnbrk) could (which he did!) or that now even Oprah (@oprah) is using the service.

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 photos? How often do they call their mother and what celebrity do they secretly admire? Get ready to find out through the MyHeritage interview series!

This time we have a special interviewee for our interview series. Elyse Doerfinger is only 19 years old, but she is already a seasoned genealogist, which makes her a bit of a prodigy in the usually older genealogy scene. Elyse is a member of the Youth Genealogists Society and the Graveyard Rabbit Student society, a student and a blogger. Her blog 'The Graveyard Rabbit Student' is dedicated to everything cemeteries; preservation tips, tips for organizing pictures of headstones, and websites where you can find a picture of your ancestor's headstone. Her other blog 'Elyse's Genealogy blog' provides tips or lessons she's learned while being involved with genealogy, as well as posts about family members and family stories, new websites, products and pictures such as the one displayed here, of her and genealogist Dick Eastman. She recently drew lot of attention to that blog by proposing that older genealogists should embrace technology more.

This is what she told us:

You recently wrote a post saying that genealogical societies should embrace technology more. Why do you think that?

I think it is a great way to not only enhance the research of the members, but it is also a great way to attract new members. It is a great way for genealogical societies to market their events to potential new members and to other genealogical societies. The possibilities are endless and for the most part, free! It would be a waste to ignore the technological resources that are just waiting to be utilized.

You are a member of the Youth Genealogist society- can you tell me a little bit about them?

War veteran and the world's oldest man Henry Allingham, whose remarkable life spanned three centuries and six monarchs - and who saw the sinking of the Titanic, the first Moon landing and the birth of his great-great-great- grandchild, passed away this weekend in his home in Britain at the age of 113.

Mr. Allingham was only briefly the world's oldest man, after the Japanese Tomoji Tanabe died in June of this year, also at the age of 113. Mr Tanabe was believed to have gotten to an old age on a diet of fish and milk and no alcohol, whereas Allingham had a different approach; once laughingly describing his secret to old age as being "cigarettes, whiskey and wild women."

Mr Allingham was a known figure in Britain, not only because of his age, but because of being one of three surviving British World War I veterans. The two still living veterans are Henry Patch, who is 111, and Claude Choules, 108.

Tintin Medel is from the Philippines and has a real passion for sharing pictures and stories with her family. In 2008 she discovered MyHeritage as the site to do so and the result is a sizeable tree, a family site that she shares with many family members and plans for a family reunion. This is what she told us:

I've been interested in my family's history for as long as I can remember. My father often tells stories about his childhood days and I have always enjoyed that.

I traced my ancestors back to my great-grandparents through talks with my father's cousins. There are close to 200 names in our tree but is not yet complete. Our tree really grew in January 2009 when I met my father's cousins and their children who live in California. We met at a family wedding of my second cousin and after that they became members and contacted relatives to communicate with me to update the tree.

We use the site in English, mostly and Filipino sometimes since it is the mother tongue for most of us. I really enjoy meeting new relatives even if it is by email and/or text message. My close relatives think creating a MyHeritage website was a great idea. And everyone is excited to share their pictures on it. Most of their pictures are taken during birthday parties when relatives gather, such as the ones published here,

It turns that we at MyHeritage are not the only ones that are interested in Barack Obama's family history. This week president Barack Obama had that history mapped out to him when the leader of the Latter Day Saints Church, a US church known for keeping extensive genealogical records for the public to consult, presented him with five books that contain his family's history.

Thomas S. Monson, president of the church, presented Obama with details of his family's genealogy during their meeting at the White House.

Obama reportedly said that he is looking forward to reading through the materials with his daughter, saying that "It's something our family will treasure for years to come."

Weddings are happy family occasions, but that they can be groovy too, proves the video below that became an instant hit on YouTube last week. The video shows a wedding party walk down the isle in a rather unusual fashion... to the complete surprise of their families! Swinging to the tune of Chris Brown's Forever, this is a great wedding video that the bride and groom put online to thank their family and friends for making their wedding unforgettable. And now it is also unforgettable to the seven million people that watched the video by now!

And here is the wedding party (literally):

If you are engaged, getting married or have been married recently

'Newbie' is definitely the tag that would suit me best at the moment. New to MyHeritage.com, to London and to the genealogy community, but eager to learn and very curious, I am the new girl in charge of the french-speaking community! In the past five years I've lived in the Paris rythm, eating baguettes, reading the French sports paper L'Equipe in the metro and getting in touch with my own culture.

It's always a difficult exercise for me to explain my background without sounding confusing, so I'm going to give you a rather chronological description of it. My Mum is Alsacian (french), my Dad is Taiwanese and I was born and grew up in Luxembourg, where I went to a European School - 15 countries, 11 languages, from kindergarten to graduation. By the time I was 17, I was lucky enough to have friends from all over Europe and to speak French, English, Chinese, Spanish and understand German, Dutch, Portuguese and Italian.

Coming from a very multicultural background, I've learnt to make the best of communication systems at a young age. First the telephone, the mobile phone and finally the 'Interweb' as I like to call it, I've developed a particular interest for the tools that have helped me - and still help me - get in touch with my scattered family and friends.

We've recently been in touch with several teachers who told us how they use MyHeritage as a tool for learning activities, all related to discovering your own family and the related issues that make up for its identity.

For some people, the idea of building a family tree is an activity that requires lots of patience and energy, as searching for names and dates can be a long process. While this may be true, the positive side of it is learning and enlightening experience when finding out about your ancestors as these names and dates illustrate the lives of men and women in one's family, that are subject to a particular socio-economic context which shaped their lives. And it is when raw data meet the facts of life when the journey to the family history becomes a true educational experience.

We'd like to invite you to put MyHeritage to work as an educational tool. Whether you're a mom, dad or teacher, let us know your ideas and experiences. We would like to support you with material that would help you get kids excited about learning from the family past in a fun and engaging way. You can start by downloading our free Family Tree builder software or setting up a Family Site online.

There is so much to discover in the life of an individual, that we at MyHeritage believe that tracing the roots of our own family is an engaging way to learn about the world, and even have fun doing it.

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 photos? How often do they call their mother and what celebrity do they secretly admire? Get ready to find out through the MyHeritage interview series!

"Genealogy is not boring or stuffy," says Caroline Pointer, the author of Family Stories, a blog about her our family's stories. She is also in the process of launching a genealogically-related business that centers around making people more aware of genealogy.

Caroline set up her blog to find out more about the online genealogy blogging world and to test the waters before she launched her company. While the blog is for everyone's enjoyment, it is specifically written for those who have never thought, heard or seen the word 'genealogy'. Her trial has turned out rather well, with Caroline making some great blogger connections, while also becoming more comfortable with sharing her family stories online.

Caroline wants to help people start thinking about what their family story actually is. She wants to inspire and motivate people to find their family story and express it.

This is what she told MyHeritage: