MyHeritage Has New Look for Historical Records

We’re pleased to announce that we enhanced the look of the category and collection pages on MyHeritage’s search engine for historical records, making them easier to use. This continues a redesign that started several years ago.

On MyHeritage, historical records are arranged in categories, for example Birth, Marriage and Death, Census, Immigration, and so on. Categories typically have sub-categories. Then there are collections that hold individual records. This huge database comprises almost 20 billion historical records, and can be searched in its entirety, through the main search page on myheritage.com/research. But you can also drill down to a particular category, sub-category, or collection and search only the records in there, to avoid being distracted by other records. The pages of categories, sub-categories, and collections have been enhanced in this latest update to make them easier to use.

Accessing a category page

Five main categories are accessible through the Research pull-down menu in the main navigation bar on the MyHeritage website. These include Birth, Marriage & Death; Census records; Family trees; Newspapers; and Immigration records. You can access them easily from this menu. You can also visit the Collection Catalog where you can locate any specific collection you need.

To visit the other category pages, visit the main search page on myheritage.com/research. Do this by simply clicking Research on the main navigation bar. Under the heading “What type of records are you looking for?”, the list of all categories is displayed.

The categories are: Family trees, Birth, Marriage & Death, Census & Voter Lists, Newspapers, Schools and Universities, Immigration & Travel, Military, Public Records, Books and Publications, Directories, Histories, Government, Land Court& Wills, Photos.

New Category Page

The Category page contains a search form with fields that are most relevant to the category. For example, the category page for “Birth, Marriage & Death,” the search form includes fields for the person’s name, date of birth, marriage or death, and place of birth, marriage or death. To maximize ease of use and reduce clutter, the search form exposes only the most commonly used fields, but all other relevant fields can still be used below “ADD DETAILS”.

For example, if you want to search all Birth, Marriage and Death records (Often nicknamed BMD for short), for all records pertaining to Richard Sharp whose father was named Laurence, you can specify Richard as the first name and Sharpe ask the last name. Then click “Father” below “ADD DETAILS” and enter the name Laurence. 

Many users are not aware that MyHeritage is very flexible in its search capability. You don’t have to specify a first name or last name if you don’t know them and you can search via a myriad of other fields, based on what you know, in order to find the elusive records you are looking for. For example, you can find all records of someone called Linda from Kansas who was married to someone called Benedict and had a son called Sam – all without mentioning last names.

At the bottom of the search form there is a checkbox that you can enable if you’d like the search to match your terms exactly.

New Sub-Category Page

The sub-category page is very similar to the category page. On the top left, there is a search form with fields that are most relevant to specific sub-category. The search form in this case includes fields for the person’s name, date of birth, father, and mother’s name. You can add more criteria under “ADD DETAILS.”

Each category and sub-category page lists notable collections in this category. Click a specific collection to access the collection’s page, which includes a search form for that specific collection.

New Collection Page

The collection page is similar to the pages for categories and sub-categories and we won’t repeat the description of the components mentioned earlier. A search made from here will include only records from this collection.

For each collection, a list of “Related collections” is displayed, and for most collections there is also a sample record from that collection, usually of a very notable person.

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