MyHeritage PedigreeMap Leaves You Lost [Rating 5 / 10]

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Find out why I give the MyHeritage PedigreeMap a rating of 5 out of 10. It’s great but there are major limitations as well. There are bugs in the system so here are the positives and negatives, pros and cons, the pluses and minuses, the good and bad about this fun featured tool that leaves Ancestry in the dust.

What does 5 / 10 equate to? Something that is half-hearted.

MyHeritage was founded in 2003 and has fast become one of the leading genealogy and DNA testing sites in the world. In fact, MyHeritage claims to be the leader according to their website: “MyHeritage is the leading global destination for discovering, preserving and sharing family history.”

Whether this is actually true or not, their stats are pretty darn impressive with 100 million users, over 9 billion records, and 43 million family trees.

myheritage-statistics-rating-5-out-of-10 — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

The MyHeritage PedigreeMap is something that really has impressed me, actually. As a continuing advocate of the importance of GEOLOCATION in family history research I’ve reviewed Ancestry’s Matches Map feature which I find severely limited. This PedigreeMap is definitely a step in the right direction for what I am visualizing! Read on McDuff!

The Positive Side of the MyHeritage PedigreeMap

The best thing about the PedigreeMap on MyHeritage is that links to it can be found in multiple locations across its website, making it less of a stand-alone tool and more of an active functioning parameter of your genealogical research.

Just click on an ancestor in your tree and out slides the profile panel. Right there under his or her place of birth, or any of the associated facts below it, are active links that will open up the PedigreeMap in another window. Basically, anywhere a location is displayed it is always embedded as a direct link to the PedigreeMap page. Extremely felicitous!

Clicking on the “profile” of any person in your MyHeritage tree will take you to their static profile page. This page features two tabs which display: “Info” and “Events.” If you click on the “Events” tab, along with a timeline, it will call up an inset map that is part and parcel of the smorgasbord of options that feed into this PedigreeMap intracomplex.

myheritage-pedigreemap-rating-5-out-of-10-01 — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

myheritage-pedigreemap-rating-5-out-of-10-03.1 — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

This map is an embedded, fully-functional Google Map that can be enlarged and played with. If you click on the “view larger map” link, it actually redirects you to the Google Maps website (google.com/maps) – it opens it up in a new tab.

The Negative Side of the PedigreeMap

This inset map, however, is where some of the problems with the PedigreeMap’s functionality begin to appear. Labeled as your ancestor’s “Trail,” it’s actually a misnomer and nothing more than an embedded Google Map pinning the singular birth location of your ancestor, which is in no way a “trail” by my definition.

A trail implies more than one location, it implies movement; it necessitates several geographic points along which someone has transitioned over several temporal ones. This map does not show that: it only pins one, single location. It is one of PedigreeMap’s several shortfalls.

Despite these limitations, it’s the only place (no pun intended) where the map function actually works 100%. The one positive about this Google Map inset (on a person’s profile page) is that out of all of the locational hotlinks on MyHeritage, it is the only one that accurately maps where your ancestor’s place of birth is. Why? Because that link doesn’t actually take you to the PedigreeMap page! That link takes you to Google’s own website (url). Ironic, isn’t it?

What’s the diff between Google Maps and PedigreeMap?

Again, when you click on a location link in any other part of your MyHeritage Pedigree tree (aside from the profile page embedded map), that link will take you to the actual PedigreeMap page in another window. So here’s where it gets wonky to me.

To really test the system in this article I chose to highlight ancestors who came from very small villages and not large cities. First of all I actually don’t have any ancestors that came from large cities, but that’s beside the point, so I though I’d represent the majority of the world’s pre-industrial revolution population by choosing a few far-flung locations to represent the common man, so to speak. This is the true test of the power of MyHeritage’s PedigreeMap!

Let’s analyze the PedigreeMap page itself. What is good about this page, and why it gets 5 out of 10, is that when a location link is clicked anywhere on MyHeritage, the PedigreeMap page opens up in another window displaying where your ancestor lived along with his or her extended family.

This is the default setting. You can choose from a drop-down menu of search parameters that include: ‘extended,’ ‘immediate,’ ‘ancestors,’ ‘descendants,’ and ‘solo.’

myheritage-pedigreemap-rating-5-out-of-10-06 — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

myheritage-pedigree-sorting-rating-5-out-of-10 — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

Locations for any given ancestor are organized by country and then by state or other sub-region specific to that country’s nomenclature. By clicking on any one of those, a panel then comes into view on the right-hand side of the page and the map in the middle zooms into that location.

Say I click on “Connecticut,” the map will re-orient itself to New Haven, Connecticut to the city itself, but not to any specific address where my ancestor is documented having lived. Hmmm, why not? Let’s challenge the system even more.

Choosing the very small village where my great-grandfather is from in the PedigreeMap page produces a pin smack dab in the middle of Lithuania, not where he was actually born, as Google Maps is able to do.

This is definitely bothersome to me. The map drops me down in the middle of some random valley just north of the city of Kaunas. This is disconcerting because if MyHeritage is going to utilize Google Maps as a geolocation tool, it should harness the FULL power of Google Maps! The whole enchilada, or in my case, the whole cepelinas!

Again, If I click on New Haven, CT it plops me down in the middle of town and shows me where Yale University is along with all of the surrounding Starbucks locations, however not directly at the street address where family’s house was located, which was actually in Fair Haven.

myheritage-pedigreemap-rating-5-out-of-10-04 — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

Google Maps inset, New Haven, CT. Heatmap — Source: MyHeritage (screenshot)

The frustrating part about all this is that the PedigreeMap program is based on Google Maps! It’s literally powered by Google Maps. So why doesn’t it work? Well, that’s because the PedigreeMap page has used Google Maps as a tool and that has obviously not been fully integrated into Google’s databases, as indicated by the url structure upon which MyHeritage relies.

This canonical inconsistency unfortunately bleeds into everything else this page does, or does not do. For example, if you wanted to see where all of the descendants of a particular ancestor lived (+descendants), it won’t accurately display that information as far as a GEOLOCATION tool is concerned. It will list all of those descendants in the right-hand panel, cool, but won’t map them to an inch of their life.

In conclusion, I do see a lot of potential in MyHeritage’s PedigreeMap tool. If I were to rate its potential, it would be somewhere around a 9/10; however, because of the practical limitations of its present functionality (not delivering what it promises) I give it a 5/10.

That is still a positive review in my book because MyHeritage is still miles ahead of Ancestry in its design. I do look forward to improvements in the future, so spread the word and let’s encourage MyHeritage (and Ancestry) to get it done right.