ROOTS & BRANCHES

The global corporate genealogy wars became quite interesting earlier this month.

MyHeritage, the Israel-based subscription site whose marquee items are its large number of worldwide family trees posts by users and its various search trademarks, bought Millennia Corporation, the makers of the popular Legacy Family Tree genealogy desktop software and well-attended genealogy webinar platform, Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

Now let me say that your “Roots & Branches” columnist has had dealings with both these outfits.

MyHeritage, you may recall from a recent column, now has a way of allowing searchers to “drill down” to see what particular databases from which MyHeritage draws its data.

This has gone a long way to improve the product for the serious genealogist – allowing users to stirp away the sometimes “smoke and mirrors” of the SuperSearch and other trademarks to see the unique assets of MyHeritage.

As far as Legacy Family Tree, I have been the guest for a number of Legacy’s weekly free-when-live webinars and always have been impressed with Geoff Rasmussen, who sweats the technical details like no one else to make sure both the live event and the recording of it are both of the highest quality.

Legacy also has one of the most popular software programs, with many loyal users since it was introduced in 1997.

The webinar platform was introduced in 2010 and I can testify to its popularity; not a conference goes by that I don’t have people telling me “Oh, I heard you on Legacy.”

MyHeritage says Legacy Family Tree will retain its full staff and continue developing its software and webinar platform, backed by MyHeritage’s resources.

Millennia and MyHeritage have started joint work on a new version of the Legacy Family Tree software — version 10 — which will include the optional capability to sync family trees to MyHeritage’s website and use the free MyHeritage mobile app to make remote updates to their family trees on the Legacy software.

The Legacy webinars have already grown so popular that they often exceed the 1,000-person capacity and MyHeritage says this will be remedied: “The webinar platform will also enjoy infrastructure upgrades to support increased concurrent viewership,” according to its press release.

“I’m excited for us to join forces with MyHeritage,” said Dave Berdan, president of Millennia Corporation. “MyHeritage clearly cares for genealogists and continues to invest in desktop genealogy software … As we’re passionate about genealogy, our team is happy to have found in MyHeritage kindred spirits and we’re excited about the value that we can create together to benefit millions of genealogists worldwide.”