How to make your own free family tree with MyHeritage, even if you don’t know your ancestors

Petr Novák

Published on 11.2.2022

MyHeritage offers discovering your family ancestors through their DNA test, but you can also create your very own family tree… yes, we know. Your family tree can be made even in Word application – for free and in beautiful colours, all you need to do is use the SmartArt function.

However, without this, i would never discover that my great-grandfather was Matthew S. Pegues, born in 1731 in Calgary, Alberta, and died at the same place in september 1822.

Create your family tree on MyHeritage, even if you don’t know your ancestors

Power of MyHeritage service lies in billions of records about people alive and people that passed away. GDPR specialists may be a bit skeptical about this, but it gives you an unique opportunity to create your own detailed family tree without knowing your ancestors too closely.

And it takes only a few minutes of your time. Create your new family tree and add all the information you know like first names, surnames, places and dates of births. If MyHeritage finds a match in their database, like couple of people with the same name and date of birth, it gives you a possible match. After you verify the match, all details will be added to your family tree.

International records database counts billions of people and comes from many different sources. MyHeritage disposes publicly available records of DOBs and DODs from people all around the world. But even more important are family trees created and managed by other users and your relatives. MyHeritage then acts like a connection link searching for a information match.

Creating family tree in practice: Knowing few dates of birth and dates of death is all you need

On one hand, success of making a family tree depends on a bit of a luck. By luck we mean how active are your distant relatives at searching and adding information.

When I added all available details about my great-grandparents, MyHeritage completed my family tree up to start of the 18th century. The more information you can add, the bigger the chance is for finding a positive match. Just be careful to check dates of birth and names when suggested a match, these suggestions are not always 100% correct.

MyHeritage won’t be a big deal if you care about GDPR either. You can control every aspect of your privacy both online and offline, so you can set your family tree as private. If anybody wants to see your family and use it for completing their own family tree, your permission has to be given first. And it’s only in your hands which data you use for your family tree.

Making your own family tree through MyHeritage is intuitive and quick. The application is searching for connections, adding names and looking for positive matches automatically all in the background.

Create family tree in MyHeritage

MyHeritage takes care of errors in your family tree

The more people you have in your family tree, the bigger is a chance to find some details that doesn’t add up. Sometimes, information about birth dates seems to a bit off, some relatives had 14 children and suddenly you discover some really weird names in your family tree like Škoda Expedit. That’s not a new SUV, but allegedly my great-grandfather.

MyHeritage offers Tree consistency checker for exactly this type of situations, which is a part of PremiumPlus subscription. This functionality can discover if your relative is “not marked as deceased and looks to be too old (202 years)”, or that one of your grandmothers had a son when she was 4 years old. Managing of all the information in previously mentioned Word would be extremely difficult without this.

And as an example, you can export your family tree as PDF file and print it out as a Christmas gift. There are many formats and graphic options to choose from. And if you never want to loose family tree details, you can backup all your data for $5.36€5 per month.

MyHeritage family tree price list

MyHeritage is unique service that helps many people discover their relatives and ancestors, but it’s not something that can replace a work of a professional genealogist that will personally dig through tons of records and paperwork for you.

Positive matches of MyHeritage service hints at the strongest part of this service – users are the ones that are adding information about their ancestors. And for most of them the goal is to have the biggest family tree possible. Information authenticity is then secondary.

But as always is the case, the difference lies in the price. Genealogists can create your family tree for around $253€236–$1,267€1181, whether MyHeritage PremiumPlus subscription costs $106€99 for the first year and $149€139 per year after that.

And you can even have more fun with your family…

Create family tree in MyHeritage

MyHeritage family tree pros and cons

• Beautiful website
  Everything is intuitive and well thought out, from free features to privacy policy.
• MyHeritage takes care of the research 
  With Premium and Premium Plus paid options, MyHeritage will find all your ancestors after adding only few of your relatives.
• Making a family tree is fun
  Discovering more and more of your ancestors is fun – you will find out their names and where they came from. You can also discover new relatives from all around the world.
• Advanced features are not free
  Some features, like access to all historical records or making a family tree over 250 people, are paid only.
• Dependency on service provider
  Your family tree data is stored over at third party and you don’t have full control over it. We advise backing up your family tree to your PC from time to time. This way you won’t lose your family tree if something happens.