All of us at MyHeritage want to give a big, warm welcome to Marcella Leite from New York. Marcella created the 300,000,000th profile today, and we are happy she is part of the MyHeritage family!

As a welcome present, we'll send you a special MyHeritage T-shirt. Welcome, Marcella!

She has a fun and interesting story about how she joined:

The MyHeritage Gift Shop is welcoming the Valentine's Day season with a special MyHeritage gift offer! Use the promotion code below to receive 5% off any purchase from our UK store.

Just enter sendyourvalentine in the promo box when you confirm your purchase.

Choose from our exclusive Valentine's Day selection of flowers, chocolates, drinks, toys, cards, and more! Celebrate a lifetime of love and memories with a bottle of fine Pol Roger champagne delivered right to your door. Or surprise your sweetheart with a box of heart-shaped truffles or one of our luxury gift baskets - it's the perfect way to say, "I love you."

Visit today to make sure your gift arrives before Valentine' Day - it's only 2 weeks away!

MyHeritage US Gift Shop launching soon. Please check back for more updates.

After all the blogposts and articles that you have written about MyHeritage over the last few months, we would just like to say, "Thank You." We were very happy to see that after the news of the new bonds between Kindo and MyHeritage, so many of you have continued to be interested in us and write about us.

And there was a lot of news: the teaming up of MyHeritage and DNA testing company FamilyTreeDNA to offer users the possibility to research their family history through DNA tests, the development of a new version of the Family Tree Builder, the popular research software of MyHeritage with new functionality, and the launch of file sharing on your family sites allowing users to upload and share video's, audio files and documents.

For those interested in reading more, here is a very small selection of the coverage of MyHeritage worldwide:

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

MyHeritage is the most popular free genealogy site in the world, according to ProGenealogists, a leading consortium of professional genealogical researchers who released a study conducted in the first quarter of 2009.

More than 300 genealogy websites were compared against each other using multiple ways to measure online traffic. In the end, MyHeritage was named the most popular free genealogy website in the world, and the third most popular overall.

Two unique aspects set our website apart from other genealogy sites. One is our community focus, which allows genealogists to meet other family researchers. The other is our online Family Tree Builder, which allows researchers to share their trees using our Smart Matching feature.

Community Focus
Only 4 of the top 50 sites were community sites, with MyHeritage by far the most popular with genealogy researchers. Communities are important because they allow you to meet other researchers, share information, and connect with people who share your passion. We believe genealogy and family history are not subjects that should be hoarded away and kept secret. Family history is best enjoyed when it is shared - it's fascinating listening to others' stories about their families!

Sharing Research
One of MyHeritage's strengths is that it gives you access to more than 6 million different family trees from around the world. Family Tree Builder automatically searches each online tree looking for matching entries, and when it finds a match, it lets you know. Using this powerful tool allows you to contact family historians who may share some of your ancestors. You can fill in gaps in your family tree by comparing entries with other genealogists and confirming the matches. Only nine sites allowed researchers to build family trees online and share them, and MyHeritage is proud to be among that group.

Thank You!
All of us at MyHeritage would like to give a big "Thank You!" to all of our members who have made our site so successful. We will continue to develop our genealogical tools and always strive to provide the best service.

We're always happy if people write about us, but we were especially pleased with this piece of coverage. >Click is what the BBC calls their "flagship technology programme", a weekly UK television show covering all the latest and best websites on the web.

Its presenter Kate Russell devoted part of the programme to MyHeritage last week, telling people about the different ways in which you can use the site, praising its user-friendly interface and branding it a 'social networking community with a purpose.' Well, thank you very much for the laurels.

If you did not see the coverage but are interested in it, you can find it here.

A big thank you to Kate and the team at Click!

2009 is a good year for us, or at least for our Family Tree Builder! We got an email the other day from onegreatfamily that we've been selected by them to receive the "One Great Genealogy Site" award for the services we're providing to the genealogy community.

And that is not the only one; Chip.de, one of the biggest German computer portals reporting news on technological advances, picked the FTB 3.0 to be their featured download.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

This week is Family History Week for Australians! A week of family reunions, workshops, talks, research days, history walks, book launches, and film evenings focused on genealogy, family history and heraldry.

With over 250,000 Australians who are members of family history related organizations, the week should be a big happening.

This week's events all center on arousing curiosity about family history, or helping you advance family research; whether it is a talk by the Australian Police Historical Society, a workshop on the value and importance of heirloom letters and diaries, a seminar with tips on how to research your Maltese family history or a tour of Sydney's Jewish museum, there should be something for everyone.

See here for an overview of the events in your region.

Of course MyHeritage has a presence at these events too.

Well, this is something you may want to have a look at. Didn't think photographs, family trees and relatives would ever have something to do with art? Think again!

Bobby Neel Adams, a sensitive photographer residing in New York, has focused much of his work on the transformation of the human body by ageing and life's circumstances. Among other projects, he features one called FamilyTree, which is a series of portraits of immediate family members sized into one, allowing viewers to discover how they resemble each other.

Have a look at his projects, the findings are stunning. All of us are using family trees, pictures... comparing, searching... and here's someone who took the artistic path to express visually an important part of the genealogical process; we think it's a very interesting piece of work.

And because we understand it's about finding similarities, you can always use our own face recognition technology that helps you organize your family photos or allows you to have some fun playing with our look-alike widgets. It's not art, but it works.

It makes us proud: Red Herring has selected the investors of MyHeritage.com -- Accel Partners and Index Ventures -- as the #1 and #3 best investment firms worldwide! The Red Herring Top 100 Global Venture Capitalists ranking is renowned in the industry, so coming first and third there speaks volumes about the professionalism, expertise and track record of our investors.

Sincere congratulations to Accel Partners and Index Ventures from the whole team at MyHeritage.com. A special thank you to Simon Levene from Accel and Saul Klein from Index who are working closely with us since 2006 and 2008 respectively.

If you...

This week we've added another language, so your family site can be displayed in as many as 35 different languages. As you'll see in your language options, we now offer Catalan as well.

We have received a lot of user requests about Catalan, so we are happy to be able to offer it now. For those of you who are not familiar with the Catalan language - it's a Roman language officially spoken in Andorra and some regions in Spain, such as Catalonia and Valencia. It is also spoken in parts of Italy and France. Over 7 million people speak the language worldwide, so a good reason for us to support the language on our site.

In fact you probably know some words that are taken from Catalan; aioli, the garlic and olive dip and aubergine (also known as eggplant), as well as the rice and fish dish paella originate from Catalan but are now widely adapted words in English.

We hope you'll enjoy this new option - Salut!

If your language is still not among the 35 or you want to help improving existing translations, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at: translate [at] myheritage [dot] com.

This week the media drew attention to a dark page in the history of Australia and the United Kingdom. Many of you know about the convicts that were shipped from the UK to Australia, but what came to light in recent weeks was that this wasn't the last wave of forced migration; seven thousand English kids from deprived backgrounds were also sent to Australia after the Second World War. In total 150,000 British children are believed to have been sent to Commonwealth countries.

Australian premier Kevin Rudd apologized this week to the British children, most of them from deprived backgrounds, who were sent to Australia, often to be put in foster homes or forced to work on farms. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown will do the same in the new year.

These children -often without even a passport or other documentation- were sent abroad with the promise of a better life,