MyHeritage

Original MyHeritage office in the village of Bnei Atarot, Israel

MyHeritage was founded in 2003 by Israeli entrepreneur Gilad Japhet (who continues to serve as the company's CEO).[2] Japhet started the company from his living room in Bnei Atarot, Israel. For a long time, the company's headquarters were located in a family farmhouse in Bnei Atarot.[15] In its infancy, MyHeritage was almost completely self-funded but had received funds from angel investors by 2005. It switched from a free service to a freemium business model.[2] As of 2020, the company and its subsidiaries have a major control of the most world genealogy data.

Early on, MyHeritage required users to upload genealogical information from desktop software. The information could be viewed online but could not be altered.[16] In 2006, MyHeritage introduced new features, including facial recognition software that recognized facial features from a database of photographs to link individuals together.[17][18] In December 2006, the company acquired Pearl Street Software which was the creator of family tree software (Family Tree Legends) and a family tree submission site (GenCircles) with over 160 million profiles and 400 million public records.[19]

By 2007, MyHeritage had 150,000 family trees, 180 million person profiles, 100 million photos, and 17.2 million users worldwide. The service was available in 17 languages. The company also began offering a new web-based feature that allowed users to upload genealogical information directly to the MyHeritage site. MyHeritage had also received a total of US$9 million in investor funding, half of which had come from Accel.[16]

MyHeritage headquarters in Or Yehuda, Israel

In 2008, MyHeritage raised US$15 million from an investment group including Index Ventures and Accel.[20] At that time, the website had grown to 260 million people profiles, 25 million users, 230 million photos, and 25 supported languages.[21] Soon after securing funding, MyHeritage acquired Kindo, a UK-based family tree building service.[22] In 2009, the company released a new version of their free genealogy software, Family Tree Builder, which included the ability to sync between the software and the website.[7]

In 2010, the company acquired Germany-based OSN Group, a family tree website network with seven genealogy sites under its name. Some websites in the OSN network included Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland, and Dynastree.com in the United States. The acquisition provided MyHeritage with several new features (including coats of arms, family tree merging, and an option to venture into mobile applications) and a total of 540 million people profiles, 47 million active users, and 13 million family trees.[23] In 2011, those numbers increased to 760 million people profiles and 56 million users after MyHeritage acquired Poland-based Bliscy.pl, another genealogy website.[24]

Other 2011 acquisitions included the Dutch family network, Zooof; BackupMyTree, a backup service designed to protect up to 9 terabytes of offline family history data;[25] and FamilyLink, a developer of family history content sites and owner of a large database of historical records (WorldVitalRecords.com, which included census, birth, death, and marriage records along with an archive of historical newspapers). By the end of 2011, MyHeritage had 60 million users, 900 million profiles, 21 million family trees, and was available in 38 different languages.[26] The company also released the first version of its mobile app for iOS and Android devices.[27]

In 2012, MyHeritage surpassed 1 billion people profiles and launched several new features, including SuperSearch, a search engine for billions of historical records, and Record Matching, a technology that automatically compares MyHeritage's historical records to the profiles on the site and alerts users whenever a match is found for a relative in their family tree.[28][29][30]

In November 2012, MyHeritage acquired one of its primary competitors, Geni.com. The company kept all of Geni's employees and operated the company as a separate brand in Los Angeles, California,[31] and, as of 2016, MyHeritage and Geni were still separate. Founded by David O. Sacks in 2007, Geni is a genealogy website with the goal of "creating a family tree of the whole world,"[32] whereas MyHeritage focuses on records and collecting non-merged individual family trees. The acquisition added 7 million new users to MyHeritage, bringing the total number of members to 72 million.[5] At the time, MyHeritage also had 27 million family trees and 1,5 billion profiles and was available in 40 languages.[33] In addition to the acquisition of Geni, MyHeritage also raised US$25 million in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.[5]

In 2013, MyHeritage entered into a strategic partnership to allow FamilySearch to use its technologies. At the time of the deal, MyHeritage had 75 million registered users and 1.6 billion people profiles.[6] The company also gained access to all United States census records from 1790 to 1940.[34] In April 2013, MyHeritage released Family Tree Builder 7.0, which included new features like sync, Unicode, and record matches.[35] MyHeritage also introduced a web feature called Record Detective that automatically makes connections between different historical records.[36]

In 2014, MyHeritage announced partnerships and collaborations with other companies and entities. In February 2014, the company partnered with BillionGraves to digitize and document graves and cemeteries worldwide.[37] In October 2014, the company partnered with EBSCO Information Services to provide educational institutions (libraries, universities, etc.) with free access to MyHeritage's database of historical records.[38] In December 2014, MyHeritage entered into an agreement with the Danish National Archives to index Census records and Parish registers from 1646 to 1930 (a total of around 120 million records).[39] The company also surpassed 5 billion historical records in their database in 2014[13] and launched the Instant Discoveries feature, which enables users to add whole branches of relatives to their family tree at once.[40]

In 2015, MyHeritage reached 6.3 billion historical records,[14] 200 million photographs,[41] 80 million registered users, and availability in 42 languages.[10] It also released the Global Name Translation technology, which automatically translates names from different languages to make searching for ancestors more efficient.[14]

In March 2016, employees of MyHeritage recorded and preserved the family history of remote peoples in the Highlands Region of Papua New Guinea.[42]

In August 2017, the company acquired Millennia Corp. and its Legacy Family Tree software and Legacy webinars program.[43]

In 2018, the company announced its sponsorship of the Eurovision Song Contest 2019.[44] It also announced that, as of October 2018, the total number of historical records reached over 9 billion.[8] Also in 2018, chief science officer Yaniv Erlich received media attention for creating a family tree of 13 million people using data from Geni.com.[45]

On September 7, 2019, MyHeritage announced that they had acquired both SNPedia and Promethease. All non-European raw genetic data files previously uploaded to Promethease, and not deleted by users by November 1, 2019, are to be copied to the MyHeritage website into new user accounts that will be created for them, these accounts will receive free services like ethnicity estimates and DNA matching for relatives.[46]

In April 2019, MyHeritage changed the autosomal DNA microarray chip from the Infinium OmniExpress chip to the Infinium GSA chip,[47] with 642,824 markers.[48]

In early 2021, MyHeritage was acquired by Francisco Partners for a reported 600 million dollars.[49] In August of that same year, MyHeritage announced the acquisition of the French-based genealogy platform Filae, in a deal valued at €31.1 million.[50]

MyHeritage uses several matching technologies for family history research. These include Smart Matching, Record Matching, Record Detective, Instant Discoveries, Global Name Translation, and Search Connect. Smart Matching is used to cross-reference one user's family tree with the family trees of all other users. The feature allows users to utilize information about their families from other, possibly related users.[3] Record Matching is similar except that it matches and compares family trees to historical records rather than other family trees.[28][29]

Record Detective is a technology that links related historical records based on information from one historical record. It also uses existing family trees to make connections between records (for instance, a death certificate and a marriage license).[36] Instant Discoveries is a feature that compares users' family trees to other family trees and records, and then instantly shows them information about their family found in these sources, packaged as a new branch they can add to their trees.[40] Global Name Translation allows users to search for a relative in their preferred language but get historical documents with their relative's name in other languages.[14]

Search Connect is a feature announced by MyHeritage in July 2015 and released in November that same year.[59] The feature indexes search queries along with their metadata dates, places, relatives, etc. and then displays them in search results when others perform a similar search. The feature allows users performing similar searches to connect with each other for collaboration.[60]

Family Tree Builder is downloadable software that allows users to build family trees, upload photos, view charts and statistics, and more.[61]

MyHeritage DNA is a genetic testing service launched by MyHeritage in 2016.[62] DNA results are obtained from home test kits, allowing users to use cheek swabs to collect samples. The results provide DNA matching and ethnicity estimates.[62] In 2018, the company offered 5,000 of these kits as part of an initiative to reunite migrant families separated at the United States-Mexico border.[9] The company also offered 15,000 DNA kits as part of a pro bono initiative called DNA Quest, which connected adoptees with biological parents.[63] In 2016, MyHeritage launched a project to help children of Yemenite Jewish immigrants that had been forcefully separated from their families reunite with their biological family.[64] As of 2019, about 2.5 million MyHeritage DNA kits have been sold, making it the third most popular genealogical DNA testing company [65] In April 2019, MyHeritage changed DNA microarray chip for autosomal tests from Infinium OmniExpress to the Infinium GSA chip,[47] with 642,824 markers.[48] In April 2019, MyHeritage began releasing data from a new DNA chip.

In January 2018, MyHeritage launched the Chromosome Browser, a tool that provides a visual representation of the 22 autosomal chromosome pairs, and which was improved in March of the same year with an option to compare up to 7 autosomal DNA matches at the same time in order to find shared common segments that can be used to indicate a common ancestor by triangulation.[66][67][68]

In February 2019, MyHeritage launched the Theory of Family Relativity, a tool that works by incorporating the genealogical information contained in family trees with the company's collection of historical records and the shared DNA segments of users in order to predict different ways how two people that share DNA are related.[69] The data used by this tool has been refreshed on a number of occasions, including an option to validate or to reject a theory[70][71][72][73]

In May 2019, MyHeritage launched the MyHeritage DNA Health test, a test that provides comprehensive health reports to consumers.[74][75] In December 2020, MyHeritage launched a feature called "Genetic Groups", which pinpoints precise ancestor locations to 2,114 geographic regions based on ancestral events and complements the Ethnicity Estimate. An update to the Ethnicity Estimate was originally planned for 2021 but has since been delayed.[76]

In October 23-24, 2023, MyHeritage removed the chromosome browser and matching segment info without any statement.[77] In October 26, MyHeritage restored functionality of the chromosome browser.

Low-quality 270×368 pixel photograph of John Howard Lindauer, scanned from a State Legislature directory

The same image enhanced and upscaled to 2160×2944 pixels by MyHeritage's Photo Enhancer

MyHeritage has included on its website a series of image-editing tools, offering from restoration to colorization and animation of images, with some of them using artificial intelligence, like the Photo Enhancer and MyHeritage In Color, both launched in 2020,[78] and the Photo Repair, launched in 2021.[79]

Deep Nostalgia is an AI-powered service that allows users to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos.[80] Released in February 2021, it attracted attention online,[81][82] resulting in the creation of nearly dozens of millions of animations.[83]

MyHeritage released AI Time Machine, a feature that uses text-to-image AI technology to produce photos of a person in various time periods throughout history, as well as social cultures, on November 2022.[84] This tool uses technology licensed from Astria, an Israeli start-up focused on customized AI image generation.[85]

The Tribal Quest Expedition project is MyHeritage's pro bono project to record the family histories of tribal peoples.[86] It also has a program to match descendants of Holocaust survivors with property taken from their family.[87] The project has been carried out 4 times, documenting Nenets people in Siberia, Himba people in Namibia,[88] the Achuar people in Ecuador[89] and the Karim, Yokoim and Chimbu peoples in Papua New Guinea in 2016.[90][91]

DNA Quest is a pro bono campaign launched by MyHeritage in 2018 with the aim of helping reunite adoptees with their biological families, donating 15,000 at-home DNA kits for this cause;[92] this inititiative was renewed in 2019, offering an additional 5,000 DNA kits[93] and for a third time in 2023, offering an additional 5,000 DNA kits to eligible participants.[11]