MyHeritage

When I was looking for something to write this post about, I stumbled onto myheritage.com. I spent over an hour looking at my family tree, writing it down, and such. Here you can document your heritage and your family tree with a host of built-in online tools used to recreate your family's past. Once you've made an account, the web site automatically creates your family home page, where you can see birthdays, important events such as anniversaries, etc. For free, fifteen members of your family can join the site, while over 900 can be documented in the tree. You are also free to advertise your family events on the site. If you wish to make your family's identity private, there is an easy setting to change that will ensure secrecy.



There is also a photo-storing feature that enables you to post your family vacation videos and a picture of your three-year-old son in the Superman costume he got for Christmas. MyHeritage, unlike so many other sites, has been able to grasp that it's not the only photo storage out there, so it allows you to import shots from places like Photobucket and Flickr, making it easy, fun, and free to share your shots with the whole family.

There is a calender where any member of the site can post family events such as reunions, college graduations, and vacations. This is useful for coordinating such things, as well as knowing what's going on. In addition, message boards make it easier than ever for polling, chatting, and sharing that age-old recipe of Grandmom's great cookies.

Outside of the family-based part of the website, there's a research part that searches through hundreds of outside databases, like the immigration records from Ellsworth Island, to see if it can find your ancestors. This is useful if you know their name, but nothing else about them.

The last thing of interest, and perhaps my favorite, is the face recognition. It will take a picture of a face, identify where the face is, and compare the face to that of a celebrity. Did you know that Lindsay Lohan looks 78% like Kate Hudson, but only 72% like herself? Ah well, different picture. But check out the morph. You can do this yourself at MyHeritage.com

MyHeritage: Celebrity Morph - Family pictures - Free genealogy