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

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...

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!

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.

In SLC, I met with Kahlile Mehr, who also serves with me on the board of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS). He gave me a personal tour of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints complex, home of Family Search.

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.

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):

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.

'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.

I'm French and in France people like to go for lunch for hours! Eating is more of a social gathering rather than the mere need to feed your body. Thus, moving to the UK and seeing that most people in the office come in with their sandwiches and munch them alone in front of their screens was somewhat of a depressing discovery. After a few discussions with the My Heritage team we agreed that it would indeed be nice to take a break at lunchtime and open up to one another. It was decided we'd attend a restaurant called The Breakfast Club which happens to be inspired by the late 80's teen movie of the same name. As soon as we sat down, the place made us share childhood memories, tastes in film and music and I guess, we started to get to know each other better...

A few weeks ago, inspired by our outing to The Breakfast Club, we decided to have another staff lunch, only this time, we went for an Indian. Based on some strong recommendations from some well informed friends, we decided to check out Tayyabs, an Indian restaurant a short walk from our office here in London. It was especially recommended for it's authentic Indian Cuisine, and considered a favourite by all my Indian friends.

Upon arriving at the restaurant, even though it was only 12:30pm, and we'd passed many empty Indian restaurants along the way, this place was already packed. In true Indian style, we were squeezed into a corner, behind a table of what must have been a party of 20 or 30, presumably there to celebrate a wedding, since everyone seemed to be dressed in fine clothes, and clearly it was an extended family of some sort, with grandparents, and younger children too ;)

After a month and a bit more on the road, I'm now back home. It's time to take a break before my interview on Sep. 15 with Susan E. King and tell you all about my genealogy tour in the US during the month of August.

My first stop was in New Jersey where I spoke to the Genealogical Society of Bergen County in Ridgewood. More than 50 people heard about the latest MyHeritage.com tools to help genealogists with their research and families to better stay in touch.

The public library where the society meets has a large genealogy section with old phone books, genealogy magazines (old and new), a nice collection of books with family information, and many computers, printers and copy machines. The library is about to redesign the space to give researchers more space and to access additional materials.

Marriages are happy occasions. Time to gather the family and unite around the love of two people for another.

We at MyHeritage.com like to think of ourselves as one big family and so when our members decide to get married, well, everyone is invited.

David Melamed is one of our web developers and he and his (now) wife Sarah got married a little while ago in a nice place in Herzeliah, close to Tel Aviv. It was a wonderful day and all of us were happy to be there to share the moment with them.

But the celebrations wouldn't have been complete without some dancing in the honor of the bride and groom and we're happy someone captured these moments for you on picture:

Sagi, Mario, David and Sarah, Dori, Ayelet and Ran (left to right)