Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Using MyHeritage Record Matches for 1900 U.S. Census Records

I promised in MyHeritage Adds 1790 to 1930 United States Census Records today that I would show how to get to the U.S. Census images on MyHeritage.  

I want to do this first using the Record Matches feature, because it is the easiest method - while I slept last night, MyHeritage performed the search for me for persons in my 40,000 person family tree on MyHeritage.  I didn't have to search for them.

There were 588 Record Matches in the 1900 U.S. Census for persons in my MyHeritage Family Tree. 

1)  Here is the Record Match (Family Tree > Record Match) screen:

2)  I clicked on the 1900 United States Federal Census collection, and the first set of 20 Record Matches appeared:

To go to the record summary and the record image, the user needs to click on the blue "Review match" button.

3)  I clicked on the first match, for Julia A. Carringer.  The record summary appeared.  Note that the "Match confidence" is 5 gold stars - it matched first name, last name, birth year, birth place, and spouse's first name.  There are three screens below for this record summary:

The indexed information on the record summary above includes:

*  Name
*  Gender
*  Birth date (month-year in 1900)
*  Residence
*  Age
*  Marital status
*  Marriage year
*  Race
*  Ethnicity
*  Number of children
*  Number of living children
*  Spouse's name
*  Children's names

Below the indexed person information is a summary of the census information - for the 1900 census, this information includes Township, County, State, Date, Ward, Enumeration District, Roll, Sheet, Family, Line, Image No.

It appears that the "Roll" number is the FHL Microfilm number, not the NARA Microfilm Publication Series (T623 for 1900) number and the NARA Roll Number.  In order to use the Roll Number in source citation, the user will have to consult the FHL Catalog and search the FHL film number.  This is a drawback for me, since I cite the NARA Publication and Roll Number in my source citations.

Below the census information summary, there is a window with the census image.

Below the census image window, there is a summary of the persons in the household, including Relation to Head, Name, and Age.  The names are links so a user can navigate to their person summary if required.

Below the household summary are buttons to "Confirm" or "Reject" the specific Record Match.  If this record applies to the named person in my MyHeritage Family Tree, I would "Confirm" the match.  If it did not apply to the named person, then I would "Reject" the match.  In this way, I can keep track of which matches I have already worked with.

At this point, clicking on the "Confirm" button does NOT attach the record to the person in my MyHeritage Family Tree.  Hopefully, this will be an improvement in future releases on MyHeritage website.

4)  In order to see more of the record image, a user can click on the orange "Full screen" button in the image window above, and the record image appears in a large screen:

At the top of this record image, the census year information, the named person's name, the State, County, Township, Sheet, Family, Line, and Image number are listed.  This summary really needs the Enumeration District and the NARA Film and Roll number.

The user can download the image using the "Download" button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.  clicking on the "Download" button opens the image in a separate browser Tab, and the user can save the image to their computer system by right-clicking (in Windows).  

5)  Once the user has finished with the specific record summary and record image, s/he can move to the next Record Match by scrolling to the top of the web page and click on the "Next Match" link.  

6)  I really like the ease of using the Record Matches in order to "mine" a specific database for records pertaining to persons in my MyHeritage Family Tree.  I can find, access, and obtain information in an organized manner, complete my task (usually adding content, and adding a source citation for the named person and other persons in the record), and then clicking "Confirm" so that I don't have to deal with the record again.  

Unfortunately, clicking on the link for the other persons in the record summary (the husband, the children, etc.) does not allow me to either "Confirm" or "Reject" the match for some reason.  I wish it would - now I will have to go to each person when they come up in a search or Record Match list to do it.  It would have been very easy to confirm them one at a time using the links for the names.

7)  The good news is that another complete U.S. census record collection is available (note that and also have full coverage with search, summary and images available, but FamilySearch, Archives, HeritageQuestOnline and Fold3 have incomplete coverage or require access to another site).

The bad news is that the indexed information provided by MyHeritage is incomplete - there is no NARA Roll number provided, and for a specific person the household dwelling number, father's birthplace, mother's birthplace, occupation, immigration information, etc.are provided.  All of those items are very useful for searching and source citations.

The URL for this post is:

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver


Delia Furrer said...


Anonymous said...

Is any metadata included in image files you download. Data that would be particularly are the citation data, date of download, and copyright holder.

Anonymous said...


I sure am disappointed.


Robbhaas said...


Aaron said...

Hi Delia, Nancy and Rob I work for MyHeritage and will ask our technical support team to contact you.

Robbhaas said...

Thanks Aaron - I, for one, would very much like to see Record matching in action - especially after all the great comments by Randy and several other bloggers - I look forward to hearing from technical support