MyHeritage review: how to get the tool that uncovers family secrets for FREE – I was astounded by what I found out

I KNOW it’s not the optimal opening to this piece, but I’ve never been too bothered about discovering my ancestry. Coming from a relatively small, unsprawling family, it’s never really interested me. Young son teaches elderly mother how to use a laptop at home. Sunny day. Credit: Getty Try MyHeritage for free for 14 days My only objectively interesting ancestral backstory comes from a grandparent who was displaced by the British carve-up of India in the late 1940s, and I had assumed that, in the ensuing chaos, all records of their background would have been lost. Sign up for the Shopping newsletter Thank you! However, after discovering that MyHeritage – one of the biggest companies meeting the demand for DIY versions of “Who Do You Think You Are” – does a two-week free trial, I thought I’d see what I could find. MyHeritage review: Quickfire Q&A How much is it? You can use MyHeritage completely free, but the paid tier – which is worth it if you really want to dig into your family history – starts at £55 per year. You can get a 14-day free trial, which is worth giving a go. Who’s it best for? Anyone wanting to learn about their family history – a subscription would be a great gift for a tech-savvy older person. What we loved: The sheer number of records you have access to, and how quickly you can discover previously unknown family secrets. What we didn’t: The paid tiers get very expensive very quickly, and it can initially be quite overwhelming getting to grips with. Is it easy to use? MyHeritage becomes much easier to use once you push through the slightly overwhelming initial stage, where you input your own information and find your immediate family. With a name like mine, I hit the ground running, but I can imagine if you’re a John Smith or a Sarah Thompson, you might have a slower start trying to find records of your immediate family. However, it’s a fascinating, engaging task, scrolling through MyHeritage’s seemingly limitless collection of birth and marriage announcements, newspaper clippings and death notices, and it’s extremely easy to lose hours of your life accidentally. The thing that makes it especially easy to become obsessed with MyHeritage is the snowball effect that happens once you’ve found a few relatives: a birth announcement can reveal the parentage of a relative that you hadn’t previously known, which can unlock the door to a branch of a family tree you never knew existed. For example, through finding the birth announcement of one of my grandparents, I found the identity of a great-grandparent, which then unlocked the family tree of a distant relative, revealing over 40 more relations going back several generations. What did you find out? Try MyHeritage for free for 14 days While I won’t go into the specifics of my family tree as I want to keep this article at least mildly interesting, I was astounded by how much I managed to unveil, even in a very short space of time. For example, as mentioned above, I had assumed it impossible to find any records of my paternal grandfather’s family due to the chaos that surrounded the partition of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s. However, I was completely incorrect: MyHeritage had records of his family going back several generations. MyHeritage also tries to illustrate these people’s lives nicely – where possible, it’ll provide you with information like birth records, death records and other details. Is MyHeritage free? Yes and no. Many of MyHeritage’s features are completely free to use – you can create an account and begin building a tree without paying a penny. You can even use the “smart matching tool”, which helps to connect your family tree to others on the platform that might be related. However, to get the most out of it, I’d recommend the paid tier. It allows you to create a MUCH bigger family tree and gives you access to tens of billions of historical records, whereas the free tier only allows you to search through free collections. You’ll also be given more sophisticated information that might link you with an unknown relative, and if you have used the MyHeritageDNA service, you can integrate information from that to enhance your search. Is it worth keeping the subscription after the trial? The best part of MyHeritage’s two-week trial is that you don’t need to use the service for much longer than that to get the best out of it. It’s not like getting a free trial for a streaming service, wherein you then have to commit to six months of monthly payments to finish the TV show you’re suddenly hooked on. In fact, the biggest revelations I found while using the service came within the first few days of starting the trial. However, there are a host of benefits to keeping the subscription going, if you do choose to. The first is that MyHeritage will give you ongoing updates about your family tree as they become available; for example, if a distant relation joins the site and provides some information that might be relevant to you, you’ll hear about it. The second – and this is the more exciting one – your continued presence on the site makes it more likely that you’ll be connected with an unknown relative if they join the site. The Verdict Whether you use it for two weeks or for years, there’s plenty to uncover using MyHeritage. The sheer number of archives, records and photos it has access to is bewildering, and the company has finetuned the process so that you don’t have to spend too much time aimlessly scrolling through names and dates (although, in my opinion, that’s part of the fun). It’s a great way to wile away a rainy day, and a subscription would also be a great gift, especially to a slightly older relative.