Hi ! Welcome to our very first post about all the less noticed MyHeritage features.

There are lots of little tricks that you may not be aware of and that you can start using to make the most of MyHeritage for you and your family. We will be discovering them here one by one.

Now, let's start with the first tip.

Did you know MyHeritage can send you reminders of the events in your MyHeritage calendar not only via Email but also by SMS directly to your mobile phone? And it is completely free! Setting them up is very easy, this is what you have to do:

If you're a MyHeritage registered user and you're using our Calendar to keep a record of birthdays or family anniversaries, go to the Settings tag in the MyHeritage home page.

You will be directed to the My preferences tab. There, go down to Event reminders, where you will be able to select "Send calendar alerts by" Email or SMS. For the latter, you just need to include your phone number (with country code!). You can send a test message, to see if everything work fine.

That's it, all done. Now there will be no excuse to miss any family event.

Did you know that you can choose the order in which you want the names in your tree to be displayed?

Many of you have contacted us about how to display names in a different order in the family tree, whether to make appear the surname first and your given name second to name an option.
This feature is critical to the Chinese language for example, in which the order of the names cannot be changed because they would mean something different otherwise.

This function has always been there on MyHeritage, so let's discover it together:

Step 1: Go to your family tree. On the right hand side of the page you will find four symbols: an arrow, a printer, a spanner and a question mark.

Step 2: Click on the scanner, the Preferences menu will pop up. You will find the Display names option at the bottom.

Step 3: Use the drop down bar to select how you want your name to be displayed and then click OK.

All done. Now your family tree will look like you wanted it too!

written by Nan, community manager China

Did you know that you can share your recipes with the members of your family tree?

A big part of a family's culture is made up by its food tradition, so MyHeritage allows you to keep it alive with a simple function that lets you store, manage and share your recipes.

It can turn into the form of a family cookbook as you can decide whether any or all members of your family tree have access to your recipes so they would also enjoy them.

It's easy and free to use. This is what you have to do:

Step 1: As you're logged into your account, go to the "Activities" tag and then select "Recipes", and select "Add recipe".

Step 2: Start following the presented steps and filling the fields as needed. You can also include an attachment to your recipe.

Step 3: Choose whom do you want to see your recipe. To do this you have to turn off the Default configuration to get access to all the options. When you finish, select "Save" at the bottom of the page.

We hope you enjoy this feature as much as your whole family will enjoy your recipes!

Did you know that you can view your family's data in reports on MyHeritage?

With one click the site lets you display reports on ancestors or descendants, where your family is located and other interesting facts.

So here is how to do it:
Step 1: Go to your MyHeritage family website and go to your family tree.

Step 2: Select the tab named "Reports".

Step 3: Click on the reports you are interested in. There are a lot of nice options.

The Relationship report is a report showing

At MyHeritage there's another way to look for relatives, friends or even make new ones: our Community Section.

If you are interested in networking and contacting new people, you can find members with similar interests to you and connect with them in this section.

You can also build a complete member profile with some interesting information about yourself to let others find you.

You can find people through profile indications of their Interests, Age, Gender, Country or whether they have a profile photo or not. Or just look through the list of all the members of the MyHeritage Community.

This is how you set up your member profile:

MyHeritage is a website made of millions of different Family Sites, a fact that makes it a 'Family of Families', a site where the main purpose is for members of a family to connect between themselves and even between families, to discover they have matching members or that they share the same heritage or history.

When you sign up on Myheritage.com we will automatically create a Family Site for you, which will contain the Family Tree you just started. You therefore become the Site Manager, which allows you to control the settings of the Family Site and Tree.

Family Sites are meant to help you organize the different groups you belong to and choose their themes and level of importance. For example, you are able to create your main Family Site which could be related to your immediate family, and then create another one related to your extended family, to your in-law's family or to a certain community you are part of.

You can create as many sites as you want. Look for the "My Sites" drop down menu in the top-right corner of every MyHeritage page you are on and choose the 'Manage my family sites' option, there you will find a button to create a new site.

Our latest addition this week makes the MyHeritage genealogy search engine much more powerful. We have expanded our database to create our most comprehensive genealogical search engine yet: With MyHeritage Research you can now search more than 12 billion names in 1,526 databases.

And you can still access it directly from within Family Tree Builder to fill in those gaps in your family tree!

This week we have expanded our database by more than 150 new sources. Here are some of the new databases:

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?

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!

Did you know you can share the photo's you have on MyHeritage anywhere online?

This is a smart little feature we launched last month which allows you to share your photo albums. It is a nice way to share you material with people who are not a member of your family site.

This is how it works: find your photo albums under the photo's and video's tab. Got to the 'more actions' drop down menu and select 'share album'.

News you want to share with your family? Messages? Announcements? Information?
Keep everybody on board sharing information that relates to you or any present or past member of your family, and write and record family history as you do it.

To keep a constant communication stream, use the bar right below the "Family news" headline in the family site home page. There you can write updates of anything you might by doing, thinking or planning, anything you want to tell others about, like how you like your new family dog!

Furthermore, discover all the possibilities that you can find in

A while ago in this series we gave you an overview of Family Sites and Family Trees on MyHeritage, what they represent and how they work. They are the common ground on which members of the family can connect, share and collaborate.

Now we want to focus on how to set up Family Sites, which is really easy.

Family Sites help you manage and organize the different groups you belong to. For example, you can create one related to your immediate family and a few others related to your extended family, to your in-law's family and to a certain community you are part of. Learn more about the advantages of creating a Family Site here.

If you are new to MyHeritage and sign up for an account, you will automatically be creating a Family Site.

To create another Family Site if you are already a member you have to go to the "My Sites" drop down menu on the right hand corner of any MyHeritage page you visit. Click on "Manage my family sites".

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.

What event better reminds you of a person than his or her birthday or marriage anniversary? That very important little piece of information you get with the MyHeritage.com calendar email alerts, which every member of a family site receives in their email inbox.

These notifications are not only reminders of upcoming family events but also allow members to post greetings on the events page or - if you are in the US - buy gifts through our flower partner FTD (MyHeritage users get a special discount there!). Users will be notified of any replies to the greetings, to help him or her and the other members keep track of the activity around the event.

And here comes a true story from MY family: An uncle of mine, who is a member of our family's MyHeritage.com site, started to

Localization references is the way in which all the information available in the Internet meets ends with reality, getting away from being a virtual world itself to become a tool to help us navigate and understand the place we live in.

MyHeritage.com is no exception to this innovation and that's why we offer maps to visually locate your relatives in your tree.

If you're using the MyHeritage.com website, you can make use of this interesting feature by checking out the profiles of the people in your tree. To do this, go to the Family Tree tab and select the People page. Then click on the person's name to get access to his or her profile If the record of the person contains the address of residence, you will see a little world icon attached to it at the end. Then hover the cursor over the icon and a window with the map of the address will pop up.

MyHeritage.com is a lot more flexible than you might expect, as we offer a vast range of functionalities for the family researcher. If you're the Site Manager of a Family Site, you can find an array of tools and functions to help you out in the Settings tab, located in the main menu.
Take a look through the pages of this section and you'll be amazed by the power you actually have to make MyHeritage's platform work the way you want, and look the way you want it to.