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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Comparing the Top Three Genealogy Websites – An Interview with Sunny Morton
00:31:34
Sunny Morton takes a look at three popular genealogy websites (Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and MyHeritage) and compares them and their features.
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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Family Tree Magazine podcast. This is the show from America's number one genealogy magazine. I'm Lisa Louise Cook.
- [00:21]
B
The top three genealogy websites offer the tools and records that genealogists want. Those are Ancestry.com, familySearch.org and MyHeritage.com. but how do you know which one is the best one for you? Well, author Sunny Morton tackles this question in her new article. It appears in the March 2025 issue of Family Tree magazine, and she is here to help us out. Welcome back to the podcast, Sunny.
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C
Hi, Lisa. Thanks for having me.
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B
Hey, in your article, it's called Three's Company, you compare the various features and the records of ancestry Family Search myheritage. One of the things that all genealogists want is historical records. But before we compare the numbers, I think I'd like to have you define for us what is an historical record, and does it differ in definition between the three?
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C
You know, it does. That's kind of. That's been one of the trickiest parts of this analysis. Wait. Way to cut right to the chase. Start with the hard questions. You're right. Absolutely. In leading with the question of, you know, how many historical records do they have? Because that is what we're looking for as genealogists. And when you talk about the historical records, we're talking about something that was created in the past, hopefully contemporaneous to the time that our relatives were living, so that it represents, hopefully more accurately than. Than something created after the passage of a lot of time, where memories and perspectives might have clouded what was written down. So a historical record is something that we're looking at, really, that we expect represents historical reality as much as possible. It's old, Lisa. Yeah, it's old. That's what we're looking for. And now you're right, though, that when we look at our different genealogy websites, it's easy to see some of these big numbers in the billions that we've got. Billions and billions of records. Well, they're not all historical records. Some of them are tree records, some of them are photographs, some of them. And now each is a record of some kind. Right. But when we're talking strictly historical records, that's only a subtotal of that total amount. But it's still enormous. We can still talk about enormous numbers of historical records.
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B
Yes. And, and I want to even drill down a little bit further on that in that when, as a genealogist, as we get a record, let's say we find a baptismal certificate or a death certific. And we think, oh, that's a record, but that's a document and it might name several different people. So do the. All three of the genealogy websites consider the document the record or the mention of each individual person?
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C
That's a good question. So there is the. Generally, what you'll find is they've recorded it by the primary person in the record. The person who passed away, the person who was born is the primary person mentioned. But as you said, there are also several secondary people mentioned that are parents or witnesses or an officiate or somebody like that. And sometimes those all get recorded as records because it is a record about the mom. It is, you know, it is a record that. So I have seen discrepant data on that. And I don't think that, you know, I could put it on the line to say that each one does it a certain way because I think it has changed over time, too. There's been a lot of conversation about that in the past of the. Maybe one of the companies saying, hey guys, let's all report numbers in the same way so that we're, you know, totally transparent. And maybe another company saying, you know, really like to report it this way because this is how it looks the best. And so, you know, I'm going to back away from that one slowly and just say that might actually, they might be counting a birth record three times. Yes, because it's a record about a mom, a dad and a baby.
- [04:33]
B
I think that's probably very likely. And I think you're totally right. We really couldn't necessarily pin down each company to say in particular. But when you look at a record, let's say on Ancestry, it's going to say the primary person was this person, but it mentions these other things. Do you want to add this to their. That person on your tree and that becomes their record.
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C
So it is.
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B
I would slant towards multiple records within a document. Does that sound.
- [05:01]
C
Yes, I think so. Well, there's multiple pieces of information for sure. Right. And we care about all of those pieces of information. And from the point of view of the company, they all had to be fielded. They all had to be. The data all had to be extracted. So why wouldn't they get credit for all of the additional data that they've extracted out of that record, too?
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B
Excellent point. And we are talking in the billions when we're talking about records, So I guess we don't have to worry too much that there isn't enough.
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C
Right.
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B
So let's get into the nitty gritty of the number of records that we're going to find at each of these websites and how they kind of stack up against each other. Can you give us kind of a general overview of the three?
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C
Sure, I can. And I think it's important to recognize. I broke it down for you a little bit in the article because it's not just how many total records, but where and when. And we care about that because we're always asking a question that has a where and a when attached to it. Right. So that does matter a lot. So ancestry, about 60 billion total records. And I notice though, when I look at the card catalog, I spend a lot of time looking at these catalogs and running my analyses based on, you know, how big are these collections relative to the entire data set here and the top 20 collections over at Ancestry, that's a very small number of their total collections. Right. They've got, you know, thousands of collections, but those top 20 collections account for a third of their record total. So we're talking US city directories, yearbooks, user submitted, family trees, remember, total records, not just historical records. So they're including family tree data in their newspaper indexes. So these, I don't want to say bloated because it has a negative connotation, but these enormous numbers that we're seeing right now are really that that explosion is thanks to the AB of AI to extract these names from the records that I just talked about. Directories, yearbooks, newspapers. Right. It can quote and unquote read through those old pages and pull out all those names and the data we're looking for. It's amazing technology, but what it means is the big numbers in those billions really are representative of records that have been pulled out from those sorts of records from the last two centuries or so. So if you're doing research in the colonial period of Australia, for example, or even the colonial period of the United States, those billions aren't going to help you quite as much right there. So they're more going to be more. The billions are really the more recent records that are extracted from print sources or that are being pulled in from people's trees. So just. And if you're researching within the last 150 years or so, you're going to love it. Right. Because they're pulling in fantastic resources that otherwise you might not have found.
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B
Yeah, for those of us who, you know, were working with these websites when they first came out, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, boy, you were not talking billions back then. And I was looking at your article, which as I said mentioned, is in the Family Tree magazine, and you were saying generally the estimates 60 billion for ancestry, 66.24 for FamilySearch and 32 billion for MyHeritage. On the surface, that might look a little bit like MyHeritage doesn't have as many, and perhaps they don't. But you really touched on something I hope everybody heard, which is the role that artificial intelligence is playing, the ability to improve indexing. A lot of times these companies have images of records but haven't been able to really take full advantage of them because technology wasn't there yet. But that is changing. And what I would I guess that perhaps your answer might be it's all just changing all the time.
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C
It all changes all the time. And I'm glad you mentioned that comparison with MyHeritage, because when we go over and look at their collection catalog, their largest five collections, so even smaller than Ancestry is their largest five accounted when I looked last and again, things change, accounted for more than 40% of their total and their family tree indexes and family tree indexes and then newspaper name indexes, because they have started pulling over enormous indexes from oldnews.com their sister company, that is their newspaper correlate as the ancestryscottnewspapers.com myheritage has oldnews.com and so they're pulling that in. And so a difference that I would see if I'm comparing those commercial partners in terms of records is the, I would say the difference in the US centric focus. So Ancestry is a US Company with deep roots in gathering US Records and records from countries where a lot of people immigrated from. So whereas MyHeritage is an Israeli company and they have a little bit more of a global perspective, a lot less US Centric, a lot more Eurocentric, especially continental Europe. And because as an Israeli company, they have a strong interest in Jewish research, also sort of the Jewish diaspora and some of those parts of the world too. So you really do have a little bit different priority level, I guess, in who they know their target user to be. And I guess it depends on like, is my research question really primarily a deep US Research question or US Immigrant to another country question, or is it more of a outside the United States question? And if it's the first, I would veer left to ancestry first, and if it's the second, I would Veer right to MyHeritage first. But I wouldn't not visit the other one because they Both do have a lot of really great content for the other kind of perspective.
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B
And FamilySearch being the third player, you can't miss because there's.
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C
Oh, my goodness.
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B
So.
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C
Right.
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B
And I would say probably while there's a huge amount of us, they really are an international focus. Correct.
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C
So, yes. So FamilySearch is a totally different ballgame. It really is. And first, like you said, because it's free, so everybody, you don't have to decide whether to subscribe. You just have to go there. Right. And you can harvest things from it. And, and it's. It's fabulous that way. You're right. So as a nonprofit, they have a global focus, so they don't even have to pick a target customer. Lisa. They don't have to figure out who's got the, the time and the resources to. To devote a subscription. Financial subscription commitment. They don't have to do that. So they, they say who's researching their family history and who is what parts of the world have had some record loss maybe that we need to really focus on or that nobody else has focused on and brought those online. So they're. They're looking to. At that truly global picture to represent, you know, Central and South America, to represent nations of Africa to parts of Asia they're starting to harvest for there. So they do have that truly global perspective and not worrying about having that target customer. And then FamilySearch, you know, the numbers are kind of tricky with them because there's so much going on. You can't just get a simple record number at FamilySearch because they've got their whole collections of things that. So 13 billion that are searchable names and then another five plus billion that are record images that are not searchable yet. But how many people are probably mentioned in those 5 billion images? Lots and lots and lots. Right. And so how do you even compare them? You can't quite. And so the best thing you can do is really try to make an estimate. But the. Because you've got then to pile on top of that, you've got their digitized book collection that they don't take an individual record count from. So there's. On top of that, you've got more than half a million of those digitized books. Their largest 20 searchable collections. I ran that analysis too. Comprise less than 20% of their total.
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A
Interesting.
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C
So I would say more collections. More. More collections that are relatively bigger and maybe more diverse. So like, I think that's just a little bit of. Of insight into that.
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B
Excellent. Well, and as Always you can go in and look at the catalog and browse to get a sense of what any of these three have before you ever make a purchase. So, you know, you want to make sure that you're seeing lots of records in the area that you're trying to research, which I think makes a lot of sense and kind of brings us to maybe take a step back and do an overview of primary strengths. We've kind of had a sense now on the record size, but if you had just a couple seconds or minutes in an elevator with somebody, what would be your elevator speech for each one and what their. The primary strength of that website really is?
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C
Well, I think I'd go back and reiterate the US Centric focus of ancestry. Absolutely. If I'm doing research, I'm going to make sure that I visit both Ancestry and FamilySearch. If I'm doing US research, if I'm doing research outside the United States, I'm definitely going to both FamilySearch and MyHeritage. And if I'm looking for people and records in other languages, I'm especially going to look close at MyHeritage because of their language translation technologies, because the fact that they are the site that has, when you think about, it's not just the records they have, but the people who are using them. Because you want to connect with other researcher researchers, right. Descendants, maybe, who are still in that homeland or maybe they've gone somewhere else. But they. They know things because you share that common ancestry. But maybe they speak a different language. And MyHeritage makes their site available in a lot more languages than any of these other sites. So that is also something to consider as you're using them is who am I looking for? I'm looking for people who speak German. Oh, I think I'm gonna. I'm gonna spend some time over here on myheritage looking through all the German trees and recognizing that there's going to be a lot of German speakers over here on this site. Now, that's not to say that there aren't people in many languages working on the. On the other sites. They do make them available in other languages, but not nearly as many as myheritage. So that's a strength over there, I'm.
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B
Going to say, and a great example again, of what technology can do. It's one thing to have the records, but it's what you can do with the records and how you can make them accessible. And myheritage using the language translation FamilySearch. Now in their labs doing the full text recognition, which is opening up the doors on records like probate records.
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C
It's crazy, all that. When I see genealogy posts from my friends on social, it's all about. I can't tell you how many of those posts start with full text search. Like, love that full text search. Look what I found. And stars. And they're so excited about it. So, yes, the technology piece is really important and I think it's going to continue to be even more important. We see MyHeritage with their amazing photo technologies. So when we look at images as record types and what we do with those images and how powerful images are not only to teach us about the past, but then to turn around and share that with family members, I promise they want to look at a picture more than they want to read my nicely written narrative. So MyHeritage really has invested so much in their photo technologies that are really fantastic to, to be able to. To make that really sparkle if you want to share those pictures with your relatives.
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B
Great point. And this really brings us to one more significant area of comparison, which is DNA. Seems like practically everybody has had their DNA tested at this point, but how do they stack up with each other? And I'll just do a little tease. We know one of these is not like the other. Right?
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C
Right. That's totally true. So FamilySearch does not have DNA tools on its website. So you can go compare your tree data all you want to in harvest records, but you're not going to get to compare your DNA data on FamilySearch. That's just a direction they've not invested. They're too busy filming the world's records all over the world. So we'll let them do that. Right. Because ancestry, Honestly, Ancestry and MyHeritage are doing a fantastic job of trying to understand the nuances of the DNA technologies as they're advancing and then helping us understand them to try to understand it itself, but then to try to communicate that in a way that an everyday person is going to just look at it and at a glance be able to understand what they're seeing. So I really, really just off the bat, want to give both of those companies a lot of credit for making something that's hard more accessible to us as individuals who are maybe not, you know, geneticists and scientists and, and they've done a really great job helping us find the stories in our DNA with the ethnicity. Both of them have wonderful. And getting better ethnicity or biogeographical predictions where that will tell you so your Gen DNA has a genetic signal like there's. You have such a strong association genetically with this place that we see it in your DNA because other people from this place share that little bit of a genetic signature. So you have that connection inside of you. And that is. And they're getting more and more accurate and more and more granular. I know that myheritage just released, they redid their entire ethnicity estimate. They did that. They launched it a few months ago and then they're like not totally satisfied. And they pulled it back, did a little bit more work behind the scenes, and then re released it. And I'm seeing some really nice things being said about as people are taking a new look at those revisions. And I think one good thing to that maybe a lot of people don't understand, Lisa, is you should continue to log in and look at those results over and over again because, you know, every three to six months or so, because your ethnicity predictions will change not because you are any less Scottish or Mexican, but because the ability to understand what part of Mexico or more confidently Scottish versus Northern Ireland or that kind of thing, that's all still evolving. And we will see more and more of that keep happening. And then the other thing we'll keep seeing is more and more matches. I've noticed that there's been a huge push lately on new tests that have come through. And I noticed my match list has kind of generated more new matches lately. So I think we're seeing a little, a bit of a renaissance. And we. The testing rate slowed down for a little while, but I think we've got a next wave of testers coming through looking for connections, curious about where they're from and who they're related to. And so we see the matching technologies are both really good on both places. They're. Both of them have different. They're kind of comparable, but different tools that try to help you figure out how you're connected to that DNA match. You see, we've got the theory of family relativity over at myheritage, which gives you a person to person perspective on, okay, we think that we can draw these lines between you and your and your match. We think that these are the connections. The path goes from you to your dad to his dad to his mom, and then on over to your match. Whereas over at Ancestry, it's more like, okay, these are all the people who have listed that they are descended from this common ancestral couple. So it's just looking at it a little bit differently. There's reliance on tree data which we both know is only as good as the tree data could be. And sometimes, despite our best efforts or the best efforts of other people, the tree data doesn't necessarily reflect the same as the genetic data. So there's, there's still a lot to work out there when you're looking at these matches. But both of these companies have gotten really good at helping us understand what we're looking at and giving us better access for a long time. Myheritage was the one that let us see shared matches of matches and Ancestry didn't. And Ancestry opened that up finally. And that was, that was a fantastic boon for everyone who had kind of reached a dead end and didn't thought that they couldn't go much further with the matches they had until they could sort of peer over their match's shoulder, so to speak, and be like, well, how are you connected with so and so, how are you? Oh, you guys are actually mother and son. That makes a difference right now. I can. Now I look a little bit differently at how I'm figuring out my connection to you. So that those tools are really important too.
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B
And some people have run their DNA with a different company. They may just have raw data. How do they compare? Which one would you go to with just the raw data to upload?
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C
So Ancestry is not going to take your raw data. They want you to test. There's. But myheritage will. And that's something I love about myheritage because they recognize that people have already tested by the time they found them sometimes. Right. And they've got this data source already. And it's no different. My data is going to be, you know, my DNA is the same whether I test it with you or with somebody else. And so they'll take your upload from other companies. And there are a few basic pieces of information you get for free. And then for $29, you can get access to all of their advanced DNA tools per test. And if, boy, if you're working with analysis, that $29 is. That's totally worth it, right? That for that test, you'll have that forever. And you can also keep access to those advanced tools if you're a subscriber, if you plan to maintain a subscription, that's great. But if you might be kind of in and out. And that's some advice that I give people sometimes, as if they're like, why? I see that there's value to both Ancestry and myheritage, but my budget really only allows me one of them. I'm like, just rotate your subscriptions, spend a year with one of them and exhaust everything that you can there. And then take a break from them for a year, go to the other one. Your tree will still be there. They're not going to erase your data. Right. You'll, you'll start accumulating hints again over there, and by the time you get back to them, six months or a year later, then come take another look. You're going to have new hints to look at, new tree hints, new record handles. And I think that that's certainly a reasonable way to go.
- [23:47]
B
This is just really invaluable. Thank you so much for helping us Compare the largest three genealogy websites out there. Ancestry.com, familySearch.org and MyHeritage.com you can get Sunny's complete article in Family Tree magazine's March April 2025 issue. It's well worth the read, as always. It's wonderful to talk with you, Sunny, and folks can follow up with you at your website. Correct.
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C
Sunnymorton.com thank you.
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A
Wonderful. Thanks so much for coming by.
- [24:20]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [24:27]
B
This episode is sponsored by Storied.com and here to tell us about this website and what it can do for you is the CEO Kendall Hewlett. Hi, Kendall.
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D
Hi, Lisa. It's great to be here.
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B
Tell us, what does Storied offer family historians? What can we do over there?
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D
Yeah, Storied is really an end to end family history platform. So we have billions of historical records and newspaper pages that you can search through. You can build a family tree, but you can also tell your story and then ultimately publish that in a hardbound heirloom book.
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B
Wow. It's amazing. It kind of brings together lots of the different pieces and one of the key pieces that maybe not everybody's getting a chance to do, which is the, the final one, the story, the book itself, something that you can share. So is it hard to get started? How, what do we do when we get to the website so that we can get involved and make something happen?
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D
Yeah, no, it's really easy to get going. So obviously we do things like hints. So if you build out your family tree, we're looking for records for you and we'll bring those to. So that makes researching a snap. We look for newspaper matches as well, and that's always exciting because newspapers are really great content. They are stories. Right. So that's really fun to clip and add to your tree. When it comes to storytelling, we've tried to make it easy for you to get in there and get going. So you can upload photos, audio soon, video, all these things that help tell your story. We have story prompts. So if you're kind of stuck and you're not sure what to talk about, it's easy. We have things like, you know, what was the best advice your dad ever gave you? You know, something like that that makes it really easy to just get started. And, you know, my dad always said, son, measure twice, cut once, because he was an old carpenter, right? And so that's the kind of thing that it's like a cool little anecdote, and it's. It allows me to talk about my dad, right, and share some of my memories about him. So that makes it really easy. We have some AI tools that will even write the story for you if you're stuck. You just write down the basics, and then it will create a draft, and then you can edit the draft, because sometimes staring at that blank page is a little intimidating. And this makes it really easy. I've always found it easier to react to something than to come up with something new. So there's a number of ways that we've tried to make it very easy to get started. So should be easy and fun.
- [27:04]
B
So if somebody has already been kind of building their family tree, whether it's on their computer or on another website, can they take what they've already done so far and upload it or add it to Storied, or should they start fresh there at storied.com?
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D
It'S up to you, right? You can always start fresh, but it's easy to start with what you've already done. So we accept gedcom import. So if you have a gedcom file from your software, you can do that easily. And then we also are partnered with FamilySearch, and we have the ability for you to import your FamilySearch tree into storied, and it will pull in all of the stories and photos that are already attached to that tree. And so you can use those as you start your storytelling. And it makes it easy to get going with a book if there's already some stories that you can pull into the book right away.
- [27:55]
B
Oh, that's fantastic. So we've already done so much of the work already. We can kind of just start building on that right out of the gate. And you mentioned the AI. I kind of like the idea of maybe getting a little bit of help. If you're not naturally a writer yourself, I assume it's just pulling from data that you've already included.
- [28:13]
D
Yeah. So what we do is we ask you, okay, just tell us a few basic bullet points about what happened, and then it will write the story for you based on what you tell it. Now, like any AI, sometimes it gets overly creative, so you want to pay attention to that and fix it. But it's there as a help. Right, and that's the, the idea. We're also looking into ways that we can have the AI help illustrate the story for you if you don't have a photo. And that's really fun because it could create an image or something like that. At least. We've found that when a story includes a photo or an image, people are way more likely to engage with it. Right. And that's ultimately what you want as a storyteller, is you want people to listen and hear your story, right?
- [28:58]
B
Absolutely. Okay, so if they head over to storied.com do they need an account and is it a subscription? How do they get going?
- [29:06]
D
Yeah, so it's very simple. You can tell stories for free on the platform. You just need to register. So, so email address, set up your password, you're going. If you want access to the premium content, the newspapers, the historical records, and premium features like video storage and things like that, then you need to purchase a subscription. But we're really trying to be an affordable option for people. So whether you want to buy storage as an end to end solution for all of your family history, or if you just want to add it as a compliment to all the other services you already use, we think it's affordable and can work for either of those. So plans start at $20 a year. So $20 for one year of access, and then they range up to $99. And that gives you everything that you want to get going on. Of course, buying a book, you have to pay for each book. Right. So that's an additional fee, but so anywhere from $20 to $99 for a year gives you access to all kinds.
- [30:06]
B
Of amazing resources, wonderful options for people who come with a variety of needs. You have a variety of solutions. It's story.com and Kendall, thank you so much for stopping by the podcast and letting us know all about it.
- [30:19]
D
Thanks, Lisa.
- [30:23]
A
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Family Tree magazine podcast. This is the show from America's number one genealogy magazine magazine. I'll have links to everything that we've talked about today on the show over at the show Notes page, and you can find that@familytreemagazine.com podcast and there you'll also find a huge back catalog of past episodes full of topics that are going to help you in your genealogy research. And when you stop by the website, be sure to sign up for our free newsletter. That really is the perfect way to stand in touch with Family Tree Magazine and get all the latest and greatest news, plus the announcements of each and every new podcast episode. I'm Lisa Louise Cook and I hope that you'll come by and visit me at my website, genealogygems.com and there you will find the Genealogy Gems podcast and a link over to our Genealogy Gems YouTube channel. So until next time, have fun climbing your Family tree.