MyHeritage’s SuperSearch feature just got upgraded with 325 million important historical records, bringing the grand total of available global records to 8.8 billion. MyHeritage is already one of the premium destinations for family history enthusiasts all over the world and this recent addition will further solidify its leading position.
The added collections include Canadian obituaries, US yearbooks Name Index, and 1939 Register of England & Wales.
Canadian Obituaries
This collection includes more than 2 million records that document memorials and obituaries from the 10 Canadian provinces, mostly spanning between 1997 and 2017. The records include the name of the deceased, date of death, publication source including locality information, and the text of the actual memorial or obituary in French or English, depending on the source. A photograph of the deceased will also be included if available.
US Yearbooks Name Index, 1890-1979
MyHeritage published an exhaustive collection of US yearbooks in December 2017, encompassing 36,207,173 pages across 253,429 yearbooks. This was a free-text collection that allowed users to search relevant entries by name or keyword.
The company is not stopping there. In-house engineers were busy for the past year developing a revolutionary automated name index extrapolated from this collection. The final product is officially released as a separate collection titled the US Yearbooks Name Index, 1890-1979. This is one of the largest collection of digitized US yearbooks ever, holding more than 289 million structured records.
The names of faculty members and students have been auto-extracted utilizing name extraction technology. The personal yearbook photos have been detected automatically and extracted via picture detection technology, in many cases associating the names and the photos with each other using a proprietary tech developed by MyHeritage. Lastly, the engineers have also developed a technology to differentiate between faculty members and students automatically, but also to determine the graduation class for all students and calculate their birth years.
The company is still working to complete the association of photos and names, and this will be released as a separate update in the future.
1939 Register Of England & Wales
The 1939 Register was prepared on the eve of World War II and is the most complete census-like collection of the English and Welsh populations between 1911 and 1951, with 33 million searchable records. The 1921 census is time-protected and will be available online in 2022; the 1931 census was destroyed in a fire; there was no census conducted in 1941.
For each household member, the register records name, birthdate, gender, address, place of residence, marital status, and occupation. If you’re a family historian with ancestry in England and Wales, this collection will be an essential genealogical treasure trove.
The Register contains 42 million records, 8.2 million of which are closed due to privacy laws, and around 700,000 appear without full names. The closed records pertain to individuals born less than 100 years ago unless they’re matched to a registered death record. They too will be made public on a yearly basis going forward.
Summary
MyHeritage SuperSearch now contains 8.8 billion historical records, including the three recently added collections. You can search the collections for free but can’t view the records without a Data or Complete subscription. MyHeritage Record Matching technology will automatically detect relevant historical records for individuals in your family tree, so pay attention to your Record Matches as well.