I know what you are saying. I keep "championing" the cause for a remove option in SmartMatching.
We know it would really improve SmartMatches to have this option and it will become available in the future.
For you to know, we are working on new sort and search functionality that will help you better organize your matches. You'll be able to do things like sort by Newest to Oldest and Most to Fewest.
And i thought all My problems with dumb- matches was a new thing.
Its good to look back 3 years- I repeat 3 years into who said What on the forum. Dear me, have myhertiage EVER listened to ANY feed back frfom ANYONE at ANYTIME. I doubt it.
Perhaps the moderator of the forum may have lsitened but the REAL IMPORTANT persons/ section clearly have no idea that there is unrest in the community. No idea at all.
I too would like to see that. Even after you label the match as incorrect, it still hangs around taking up space and adding confusion. Please make it possible to remove matches if they aren't valid. Or better yet, once they have been categorized/merged, why don't they just disappear, or go to another page?
I have thousands of smartmatches and it is an absolute pain going through them all. Especially irritating when one has to go through it all over again when uploading new version of one's tree (although I do note now that there is a new feature which places a citation in a matched record - maybe that will lead to some sort of pre-filtering?)
What is unfortunate about this is that the Smartmatching feature is the single most attractive part of My Heritage and it is such a shame that it is so cumbersome to use.
Asuggestioncouldbe:
In the list showing matchs add the number of rejected match and the number of match not validated (not confirmed/rejeced)
Today you can only see the total amount of matchs and the number of confirmed matchs.
I have been researching my family tree for 15 yrs, preinternet it was very difficult to trace ones family tree, many hours have gone into gathering the information that I have about my ancestors. When I starting using the internet for family history I was able to solve some of the dead ends that I had come across.
Sadly, there are people out there that abuse our research. A few years ago I had a real problem with someone who had 'mined' all my research, I was stupid enough to allow him to see my tree after he had claimed that we had a link. And through answering his questions he was able to obtain information about my immediate family. When I contacted him requesting that he not display my personal information on a particular site, he sent me a very rude reply and refused to delete the information. Not only that, he had also incorrectly displayed some of my ancestor details.
In the end I contacted the internet site provider and I belive they deleted him. Yesterday I joined this family tree site. I only added myself and 3 generations of information, tday I have had an emal telling me that my names matched some added to this site by another researcher. That included myself!! It is the ssame person that I had problems with a few years ago. He has NOT had my permission to share my personal information with anyone. I am very cross that I have found his still doing this. I belive that if you share information with others you firstly should consider whether you are going to tell them about living relations, I have been told that it is actually illegal for you to share information or display it on these sites without their permission. Secondly if you do share this information, ask them not to share information about living people on public sites.
It is frustrating to see ones research hijacked, It is annoying to find tat someone is sharing incorrect information about your research. And in this day and age with banking security in mind, it is worrying that someone can spread information about yourself on public sites.
As far as I know I have now removed my family trees from all the family history sites that I have joined. It destroys the fun of family history. I have contacted the site owners, whom I hope will takethis matter seriously.
In spite of the fact that it came at an unfortunate cost to you and your genealogy research, I think it is incredibly valuable to others who are researching their family history to hear stories like yours as well.
You are correct in saying that it is important to try to be as aware as possible how and with whom you share information.
It goes without saying that there are people who may take advantage of a kind heart who wishes to help others, although there are thousands of people who successfully collaborate with each other every day at MyHeritage.
I hear really amazing stories from members all the time. I am sure you have some too.
At MyHeritage we understand that privacy is very important to our members. For example, as XXX mentioned in his post, guests cannot see first names or details about people marked as living in your family tree.
This is the default setting for every family site.You don't need to set any special privacy settings to activate this feature.
You can also make your site completely private as you mentioned you preferred to do. If you would like to turn off SmartMatching for any of your family trees, you can do so by clicking on Family Tree > Manage Trees and clicking EDIT next to the tree.
I'm sorry you had a troubling experience and that you had to relive it here at MyHeritage. I'll be happy to help you with any questions or comments you may have.
sorry to hear of your problems. One thing that this site does well is that you can set living relatives to be private, so it will just list their last names, and nothing else. That protects the identity of those who could be hurt by its misuse, while allowing the sharing of distant relatives which makes these sites thrive.
There REALLY needs to be a way to merge smart matches. I entered in the family infomation that I knew, and the smartmatch function worked really well in finding all the information about relatives. The problem is that those records are more complete than mine and I want to get the information from them and add them to my family tree. Without the cumbersome step of writing down all the birth/death dates and then re-entering that into my tree? When add a new record to a contact in outlook, it asks you if you want to merge those records and let's you keep what you want.
In addition, I have imported a lot of GEDCOM files and now have many duplicates. It would be nice if you could merge duplicates too.
The site and tools are great, but they really could use some work to be special.
There is a new Automatic Merge function for SmartMatches available in Family Tree Builder Premium.
If you work on your tree online, it will still be necessary to manually enter information from SmartMatches you've received.
You are correct about needing a function to recognize duplicates when merging a gedcom file. This is one of our priority feature requests and will get attention in the near future.
(We're working on allowing synchronization between your online and Family Tree Builder trees right now, so hang on for the merge feature).
The "Merge smart match" functionality only works partly.
Often when I try to merge results from another tree, the individual ends up in my base without an own name. The only name is placed in the reference/source-tab. The firstname/lastname are blank.
I have to fill these fields out myself afterwards manually. The birthdata, place, deathdate and place are all automaticly filled out, but not the names.. strange..
It appears that SmartMatching is only matching for the info that I loaded from my GEDCOM, not the info I manually inputted online. Do I have to download the GEDCOM then upload the GEDCOM again for it to work for all the individuals listed? Is the smartmatching done weekly automatically or can I manually request for the SmartMatching process to happen again? Thanks!
So I have a smartmatch, someone with twenty plus people in their tree which overlap with those in mine. How do I merge them?? As he continues to eloborate and discover details about those people, or as I do, obviously those updates need to be reflected in our respective tree.
