I’ve been an Ancestry dot com subscriber mostly on / occasionally off since the nineteen-hundreds. I built my tree on Family Tree Maker. Since FTM works in tandem with Ancestry, changes to one or the other was easy peasy.

My free time was limited for a few of those years and my tree would sometimes lay dormant. When circumstances allowed, I would pick up where I left off and begin my research again, always docking my work exclusively on Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.

At a recent genealogy meeting, a group of researchers were talking about My Heritage. Of course, I knew of its existence, but it had been ages since I really explored My Heritage dot com.

I took advantage of the “try us free for two weeks” offer and started wandering around the site. I added 45 names, one at a time to see what results My Heritage would offer me.

I like the look and feel of the My Heritage web site. I found it to be very user-friendly and could easily understand why some of my friends and family members built their trees at My Heritage rather than at Ancestry.

This isn’t to say it has to be an either/or exercise. Both Ancestry and My Heritage have pros and cons, and of course they each appeal to different users for different reasons. It will take more exploration to choose which of the sites works best for me, but so far, I’ve been quite impressed.

I entered my 2nd-great-grandfather’s name as Peter Thompson and My Heritage returned with a record match for Peter Mysse Tonnesen or Thompson ~ my 2nd-great-grandfather’s entry on a List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigrant Inspector at Port of Arrival. It’s one of my most treasured genealogy records because it contains a wealth of information about Peter and the circumstances surrounding his re-entry into the United States.

This isn’t a new-to-me record, but it is an impressive “14-day-free-trial” record match.

Well done My Heritage. Well done.