MyHeritage has bought FamilyLink and WorldVitalRecords. MyHeritage is a social network for sharing family history and family trees, and it does it very well. FamilyLink is an attempt to do something similar that never really worked, in my opinion, and WorldVitalRecords is a source of genealogy-related records, like Ancestry, that also never really made it, at least in Australia.

FamilyLink has/had a Facebook application for creating and sharing trees that I could never manage to get to work properly, which is a shame as I think there is a market for such a thing. I had a subscription to WorldVitalRecords that I haven’t used for a long time, and now that I’ve gone in there again I can see that it looks exactly the same as FamilyLink:

My subscription to WorldVitalRecords was most useful for its Australian content from Archive Digital Books Australasia, which has since moved to FindMyPast.com.au, and so I haven’t been in there for a long time.

It all sounds like a particularly messy family tree, doesn’t it!

I will be watching to see what MyHeritage does with its new purchase.

This is the press release from MyHeritage:

MyHeritage Acquires FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com

Significant move into US and addition of historical content mark major evolution for world’s most popular online family network

PROVO, Utah & LONDON, UK & TEL AVIV, Israel-- MyHeritage, the most popular family network on the web, announced today the acquisition of FamilyLink.com, Inc., maker of the family history content sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com. This is MyHeritage’s seventh and largest acquisition since 2007. The purchase marks a significant move into the US market commercially and operationally, and will boost MyHeritage’s offering to families with the addition of a vast database of more than 3 billion historical records. With offices and staff in Europe, Australia and Israel, MyHeritage will now be adding its first US-based office in Utah, the home of FamilyLink.com and often cited as the family history capital of the world.“We are delighted to join forces with the talented FamilyLink team in Provo to deliver meaningful value to families across the world,” says MyHeritage CEO and Founder Gilad Japhet. “Combining close to one billion family tree profiles on MyHeritage with FamilyLink’s massive library of historical data delivers a perfect one-stop-shop for families looking to discover and share their family history”.Founded in 2006, both FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com are subscription services which provide access to a huge database of historical content, covering several billion individuals within census, birth, marriage and death records, as well as the web’s largest archive of historical newspapers. This content will deliver new insights and value to the 60 million people who have signed up on MyHeritage in 38 different languages, creating more than 900 million profiles in 21 million family trees. When brought together under the MyHeritage umbrella, the company’s innovative Smart Matching technology will automatically match any of the new historical data to the relevant users’ ancestors and relatives within the family trees.

“Our team of family history veterans couldn’t be more excited about joining forces with MyHeritage”, said FamilyLink.com CEO Paul Brockbank. “This acquisition creates new horizons in exploring family history. People will receive the opportunity to search the most comprehensive historical content sources and make exciting new discoveries; share this information with their close family and save it into their family tree. Combined under the leadership of MyHeritage, the service will continue to flourish and add more value to millions of families”.

MyHeritage Founder and CEO Gilad Japhet adds: “The establishment of a US base for MyHeritage in Utah, the international center for genealogical research, is an important milestone in our growth and brings about an exciting opportunity for the company and the families we serve. MyHeritage provides the perfect service to collect the family’s treasured archive to share and keep for future generations in a setting that is friendly and secure – and now we’re excited to top this off with vast amounts of content that will add more color and life to family trees. Through our powerful search engine and automatic Smart Matching technology we’ll find your mother’s yearbook, your great-grandfather’s will and your ancestor’s immigration record, leaving you with the time to marvel at, enjoy and share your family heritage. We’ll do that on a massive, global scale, as we live in a world that is smaller and more tightly connected than ever before”.

This is the latest in a series of strategic purchases by MyHeritage since 2007 which have included Pearl Street Software, makers of GenCircles.com and the Family Tree Legends software; free family tree backup service BackupMyTree.com; European family social network market leader OSN (Verwandt) GmbH; Dutch family network ZOOOF; British family network Kindo.com and Polish family network Bliscy.pl.

The majority of the FamilyLink.com employees will join MyHeritage, based out of the company’s new US office in Provo, Utah: bringing the benefit of their collective expertise within the family history and North American genealogy market. The CEO of FamilyLink.com, Paul Brockbank, previously CEO of Logoworks and GM of Hewlett Packard Web Print Solutions, will play a key role in supporting the transition over the coming months and will later join the MyHeritage advisory board. FamilyLink.com founder Paul Allen, previously a co-founder of Ancestry.com, and FamilyLink.com’s “We’re Related” Facebook application, will not be part of the merger with MyHeritage.

In the short-term, MyHeritage will continue to operate the two sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com, with the intention of achieving full integration within MyHeritage in 2012. With immediate effect and for an introductory period, loyal subscribers and users of MyHeritage will be entitled to discounts of up to 50% on FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com subscriptions, and vice versa.

About MyHeritage

MyHeritage is the most popular family network on the web. Millions of families around the world enjoy having a private and free place for their families to keep in touch and to showcase their roots. MyHeritage’s Smart Matching™ technology empowers users with an exciting and innovative way to find relatives and explore their family history. With all family information stored in a secure site, MyHeritage is the ideal place to share family photos, and celebrate and preserve special family moments. The company is backed by Accel Partners and Index Ventures, the investors of Facebook and Skype. For more information visit www.myheritage.com.

Social Media for Family Historians, my first book, was published on Friday 22nd October 2010. It was launched at the Unlock The Past History and Genealogy Expo in Sydney.

It contains 76 pages in full colour to explain what social media is and why it is of use to family historians. It introduces more than 25 websites that can help family historians, and anyone with families, to communicate, share and collaborate with each other.

I think social media could have been designed specifically with family historians in mind. The networking that we do as researchers is made much easier by social media sites, and the interest that we have in distantly related family members is way beyond that of a normal person!

We can share our family trees, documents, photos and videos; use Skype to communicate across the world; and write a blog to share our discoveries with family members, and to allow others to find us.

Here is the Table of Contents:

• 1. Introduction
• 2. What is Social Media?
  • The Internet
  • Self-publishing
  • Social media
• 3. Why use it?
  • Advantages
  • Disadvantages
• 4. Communication
  • Chat
  • Mailing lists and Forums
  • Social Networking
  • Blogs
  • Microblogging
  • Virtual Worlds
• 5. Sharing
  • Family Trees
  • Photographs
  • Videos
  • Social Cataloguing
• 6. Collaboration
  • Wikis
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Documents
  • Questions and Answers
• 7. Dangers
  • Risks
  • Some simple rules
• 8. What are you waiting for?
• Appendix 1. How to get started with Facebook
  • Sign up for Facebook
  • Using Facebook
• Appendix 2. How to get started with blogging
  • Find a host
  • Create an account
  • Name your blog
  • Set Security
  • Create your profile
  • Select a design
  • Start writing!
  • More advanced blogging

The book is $19.50 plus postage. It will be available from Gould Genealogy any minute now, or directly from me. Email me if you are interested in purchasing a copy at carole (at) heritagegenealogy.com.au.

FindMyPast.co.uk has been celebrating the World Cup (soccer, or football as it’s known in most of the rest of the world) by offering free access for 90 minutes while England is playing.

For the first game the access while while they were actually playing, which was 4:40am for us here in eastern Australia.

For the next game they are allowing you to choose your time. 90 minutes within a 24 hour period is a good deal!

All records available in a Full Subscription will be available, including the 1911 Census.

http://www.findmypast.co.uk/world-cup.jsp?77tadunit=58601fec&utm_source=aw_uk&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=gen

ScotlandsPeople, the site that gives us Scottish parish registers, civil registrations, wills and more, works on a pay-per-view system where credits expire after 90 days. If you buy some more after the old ones have expired the old ones are reactivated, so you don’t lose them completely.

They have issued an announcement to the effect that you can reactivate old credits on a one-time only basis without buying new ones.

ScotlandsPeople would like to offer all customers who have existing credits in their account the opportunity to re-activate and use the credits at no cost through the use of a voucher code. We are doing this to allow customers who have expired credits to take the opportunity to use these without making a purchase.

All customers who have existing credits can now use the free voucher code SCOTLANDSPEOPLE which will re-set the credit expiry to 90 days in their account. Customers may use this voucher any time until 1.00 p.m. on Thursday 17th June, 2010. The voucher may only be used once in each account.For information on how to use the voucher code, click here.

It’s quite easy. Just log in, click on the Need More link, and enter the voucher code SCOTLANDSPEOPLE. Your credits will now expire in 2160 hours, and no money will have changed hands.

They have made this offer available until 17 June 2010, so do it now before you forget!

MyHeritage has announced it’s Top 100 Genealogy Sites for 2010 from around the world, and I’m very pleased and proud to say that this blog has been included.

There are some great sites on the list (besides this one!), many of which you may not have seen before, so have a look around and see what others are doing.

I guarantee you will learn something!