MyHeritage Introduced Record Detective II

MyHeritage has introduced something new. It is called Record Detective II and it is a significant upgrade over the original Record Detective. Genealogists who use MyHeritage can use Record Detective II to advance their family history research further than ever before.

Record Detective the original, was launched in 2013. It was described as a “breakthrough technology” that would automatically extend the paper trail from a single historical record to other related records and family tree connections.

The original Record Detective used something called transitivity. MyHeritage describes transitivity this way: “If record A was matched by person B in a family tree, and person B matched person C in another family tree, and person C matched record D, then records A and D were considered matches”. The Record Detective would connect each record to the rest. This process did result in helping genealogists connect up records they might not have been aware of, and to learn more about an ancestor.

There were some limitations with Record Detective, though. It was only able to use transitivity to “connect the dots” when there was at least one family tree on profile on MyHeritage that matched a record. If there wasn’t one – then Record Detective didn’t have any other data to go from.

Record Detective II is described as “Sherlock Holmes on steroids”. It is able to find a greater number of matching documents for each record. MyHeritage says that Record Detective II has yielded an additional 2.2 billion matches (as of the end of February of 2016). Another great thing about Record Detective II is that it can do direct record-to-record matches even for records that have no matching family tree profiles on MyHeritage.

The records viewed by Record Detective II can come from totally different collection types. For example, a record can come from the BillionGraves collection of headstones. That record can be viewed without a subscription. It is worth noting that not all of the records located by Record Detective II will be free to view. (The MyHeritage blog says that the majority of the records found by Record Detective II are not free.)

This new technology is only available at MyHeritage. Genealogists who want to make use of it, and who do not currently have a MyHeritage account, can get one. Upload your GEDCOM, or create a brand new family tree. Discover what Record Detective II can find for you.

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