Invite Family Members to Help You Build Your MyHeritage Tree

May 18, 2015 By Rose Davidson

I’ve had fun using my MyHeritage account and seeing what it has to offer. After uploading a GEDCOM file that contained many generations of names and information, I was flooded with what MyHeritage calls Smart Matches™ and Record Matches. The idea of inviting a family member to help started to sound very good. I noticed the area on the MyHeritage homepage to invite members, but didn’t understand what I would be offering them. 

This is what I learned. . .

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• When you invite someone to be a member of your family site, they are allowed to add content to your site such as photos, videos, documents, news articles, comments, etc.
• If you edit your MyHeritage family tree online, members will also be able to add people to the tree and invite other people to be members of your site.
• The “What’s New” section on your homepage shows you when one of your members adds content to the site or adds to the family tree.

The team effort of having family members working and building up one family site, rather than each having their own, makes sense. MyHeritage has matching technologies that find records, which you can confirm or reject as good or bad matches. It would be so helpful to have a family member assisting you with these. Maybe one family member is more interested in stories or photos and they can take the lead on adding those. MyHeritage is very helpful in pulling together information on your family and it’s also a great way to get other family members interested in family history.

To invite a family member, all you need is his or her email address. On the home page, click Invite More Family.

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The names you’ll see listed are people who are in your tree. You can invite those not in your tree by scrolling to the bottom of the page and using Invite More People Manually.

You can also invite living individuals on your tree to join directly from the tree itself! Note the option in the example below:

The family member will receive an email invitation asking them to become a member of your MyHeritage site. The message tells them how many names are currently in the tree, and tells them how they can help. It also gives them the direct link to start using the site. They will just need to create their own password. In the Settings tab, you can decide how much access to share; providing full access is recommended. You can also set goals based on the tree’s needs and communicate those goals to other group members.

Finally, encourage tree members to look at the Family Tree/Reports/Statistics to learn the average age your relatives lived, married, had children, and more. You will notice a deepening appreciation for your ancestors as they learn more about them.