Serendipity With My Heritage ~ Book Matching

For decades I have noticed that the view from Highway 24 of Mt. Diablo is gorgeous especially in the spring.  I've wanted to get a photo of it that was unobstructed by buildings, road signs, traffic, electrical wires and humankind. 

I wanted to capture something that celebrated to earth view and not the world view.  We've lived in the shadow of it for most of our lives, Sunday's drive by came close to my goal!
Serendiptity equals a happy accident...which did occur.  How does this apply to family history you are probably thinking.

Well when we learn about something new like book matching technology it is a good idea to check it out.  I thought about my family tree and considered who I might want to get more information about.  I chose my paternal 3rd great-grandfather, Newcomb Godfrey. Born in NY in 1806.

I went to the website http://myheritage.com.  >

On My Heritage you click on the Research Tab>

You see a search box but on the right hand sidebar you have some filtering choices.>

Select Books and Publications>

Now enter your person's information in the search box at the left upper corner>

Select Enter and Voila!  You will see some things that hopefully will be as much of a surprise as I did.

https://www.myheritage.com/research?s=208942181&formId=publication&formMode=&action=query&exactSearch=0&useTranslation=1&catId=8020&qname=Name+fn.Newcomb+ln.Godfrey

I  then looked at the very first entry for Newcomb.  I opened it and read it and save it and entered it into my sourcebox and attached it to my 3rd Great-Grandpa.  Now that book reference is captured and saved to Family Search.  

In the process of doing that I remembered that I had been trying to get another person to release the sealing of Newcomb to his parents Elijah Godfrey and his wife Hannah Reynolds.  No response from the person in two years.  This family work was begun over ten years ago.  I checked last night and Family Search had finally released it so I quickly reserved the sealing for us to do soon! 

 From the article that I saved from this first book entry I learned for the first time that Hannah Reynold was of Irish descent.

I 'd say that was serendipity wouldn't you? Below is the source I created in Family Search to attach to my ancestor's Person Details Page in the Family Tree.

My Heritage and Book Matching Technology

Redwoods in Oakland CA

Each of the the big genealogy companies have a lot to love but My Heritage stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to advanced searching technology.

Here is a current press release from My Heritage on their new and exciting Book Matching Technology.

EL AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah, April 7, 2016 — MyHeritage, the fastest-growing destination for discovering, preserving and sharing family history, has launched today a revolutionary addition to its suite of technologies: Book Matching. This innovation automatically researches users’ family trees in historical books with high precision.

In April 2012 MyHeritage launched SuperSearch™, a search engine for historical records, which has since then grown to include 6.6 billion historical records, including birth, marriage, death and census records. By implementing its vision of enhancing genealogy with technology, MyHeritage then developed a line of unique and sophisticated technologies that automatically match the records from the search engine to the 32 million family trees uploaded by its users.

In December 2015, MyHeritage expanded its data collections to include digitized historical books, with an initial corpus of 150,000 books of high genealogical value. This collection was tripled last week to 450,000 books with 91 million pages. With a team of more than 50 dedicated curators, MyHeritage aims to add hundreds of millions of pages of digitized books to the collection each year.

As of today, MyHeritage users will receive matches between profiles in their family trees and the books from this collection. The Book Matching technology analyzes the book texts semantically, understanding complex narrative that describes people, and matches it to the 2 billion individuals in MyHeritage family trees with extremely high accuracy. This breakthrough technology is the first of its kind, and is exclusive to MyHeritage.

Book Matching has produced more than 80 million matches, and this number will continue to grow as the collection grows and as the family trees on MyHeritage continue to expand. Book Matching is currently available for English books, and the technology is being enhanced to cover additional languages. In addition, de-duplication technology is being added in the next few weeks to remove duplicate books that have been scanned and OCRed more than once by different sources.

“No one has ever done this before,” said MyHeritage Chief Technology Officer, Sagi Bashari. “Our Book Matching technology reads hundreds of thousands of books for you, every hour, comparing them to your family tree and pointing you to relevant excerpts about your ancestors with almost no false positives. MyHeritage is the first to offer full semantic text analysis in this way, and the genealogical breakthroughs speak for themselves. You will be amazed at the value of books for your research.”

“I’ve personally seen what this new technology can do, using my own family tree,” said blogger and lifelong genealogist Leland Meitzler. “It found well over 500 books with information on my family, most of which I’d never seen before. All kinds of ancestors and relatives can now be added to my tree! To say that this new search technology changes everything would be an overstatement, but not by much.”

Genealogist James Tanner said: “This advanced technology from MyHeritage opens up a whole new world of research possibilities that were almost completely unavailable in the past. I have always valued the content of the older genealogy books because the people who wrote them were contemporaries with my ancestors. Being able to search these books on a large scale will change the way most of us have been doing genealogy and our attitude towards the books that have been there all along but were not searchable.”

Dick Eastman, of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, summed up MyHeritage’s latest innovation: “MyHeritage Book Matching is like having a huge library at your fingertips, with a twist; there is a magical librarian who tells you exactly which books have information about your ancestors.”

Book Matches are available at www.myheritage.com and are generated automatically for any family tree built on the website or imported into it. A Data subscription is required to view Book Matches."

Dick Eastman has written about this new technology.

https://blog.eogn.com/2016/04/07/myheritage-releases-exclusive-book-matching-technology-for-family-historians/