I am new to "My Heritage" and I am still working my way around the program. I have not yet signed up with a subscription. I notice that some of the Smart match researchers have a LOT of people in their trees. (As many as 20,000 ) Are some of these reseachers proffessionals, just collecting names? I am interested in matching up with family members, how can I tell the difference?
I am quite new too but have come up to about 1800 in just 3 months. I have striktly only worked back in time and just added parents and lately all sibblings for each generation. Doing so I hope for more Smart Matches from people who has relativs among those siblings and maybe they have come furthur in the search which could help me. Other people, when they have come as far as possible, turns back and search forward for offspring of all siblings and looks for living relatives.
I can say that I found some historic persons in my heritage so I began to add all related persons even if they where not direct relatives just for fun. I come from Sweden where it is quite easy to come down to late 1700 for most branshes in the family tree as long as the parents are married. If you are lucky and your relatives owned their farms you can come down to early 1700 and possibly even 1600 and even more so if your relativ belongs to the nobles as one of my relatives did. And then almost all are in some way relative to early swedish kings and to in the european nobles. Of course some people may have bragged about there heritage way back in time to look better then they where so you have to take the information with caution.
So if you just add your parents and their parents and... you wont get so many people before a branch is ended. If you are lucky and fill all branches the number of people will double for each generation. After 10 generations the tree will exceed 1000 people with just direct relatives. If you add all siblings you will have thousends of people in your tree.
Very few people on here are professionals. As far as why a tree is so big, it depends on the tree. Some really will have a bunch of people on the tree. Others have copied many times and have the same people several times on the same tree. Other trees are complete gibberish and count mythical gods and fictional people as ancestors.
