MyHeritage Announces Partnership With FamilySearch

“We've entered into a strategic partnership with FamilySearch which will add billions of historical records to MyHeritage,” said Aaron Godfrey, public relations manager at MyHeritage. “MyHeritage will receive more than 2 billion global historical records from FamilySearch, spanning hundreds of years.” The collections include censuses, vital records (birth, marriage, and death), and hundreds of other collections from all over the world. The records will be available to MyHeritage users for searching using MyHeritage’s SuperSearch technology and matching using their Smart Matching and Record Matching technologies. This will occur in the next few months.

In return, MyHeritage will provide FamilySearch with the Smart Matching and Record Matching technologies for users on the FamilySearch website. This will be available sometime during 2014.

User contributions to the FamilySearch Tree will be included in the records given to MyHeritage. However, information will not be flowing back the opposite direction. “Content uploaded by MyHeritage users will stay only on MyHeritage and this content is never licensed, shared, sold or given to any third party,” said MyHeritage.

This announcement follows on the heels of a similar announcement made by Ancestry.com back in September. (See “More Information on Ancestry.com/FamilySearch Agreement.”) This announcement may have been alluded to by FamilySearch’s Don Anderson at the organization’s annual business meeting. In my article, “FamilySearch Annual Business Meeting,” I reported that,

Anderson said that sharing FamilySearch records with partners results in more people using the records and the more FamilySearch shares with partners, the more the partners share with FamilySearch. Anderson added that FamilySearch is working with partners to facilitate growth of FamilySearch Family Tree. Brimhall reported that more information would be forthcoming.

For more information about the MyHeritage/FamilySearch agreement, see the MyHeritage blog and the official press release.